WOW !!!!!!!!! Success !!!!!
I found this entry on a Steam Discussion forum. It is from TacticalBacon00. Thank you !!!!
Once I disabled Sonic Studio from the start up menu....Realflight works!!!!
I don't know what changed in my setup for this to start happening in the first place but I am happy i found the issue.
Quote:
TaticalBacon00
tl;dr: Uninstall, disable from startup, or exit out of Sonic Studio before launching the game.
I've been experiencing the above error when trying to launch Shovel Knight for the past 3 weeks. Steam Forums, Reddit, and Google have been no real help.
Well, I just replaced my motherboard with a shiny new Asus ROG Maximus Hero IX (Z270 chipset) and it's sound drivers are a special, ROG-branded edition of Realtek's normal drivers. I uninstalled them and went with the Windows 10 default drivers for this board. Now this worked, but I had no control over which audio output my sound was going to.
So, I installed the standard driver from Realtek (not Asus' site), rebooted, but somehow the SupremeFX ROG drivers were installed again! It seems that the special branding is included in the 500MB+ driver pack along with the Shovel Knight and Spelunky crashes.
Since this crash is definitely tied to audio drivers, I started disabling things on startup, then rebooting on each one to trace the EXACT cause. Once I disabled the Sonic Studio software from starting up, both Shovel Knight and Spelunky began to work again.
You do not have to uninstall Sonic Studio, just close out of it before launching the game and it'll have no problems. Sonic Studio is a software that lets you apply some equalizer effects and route certain programs to different sound devices. Cool program included with the drivers, but it's interference means that it's gotta be stopped.