Crackling audio and Stuttering Video

Getting fed up with the Windows 10 update system for many reasons drove me to installing my Vista Ultimate with all the newer drivers. The Nvidia 341 series works well, if not identical to operations in Windows 7 & 10, in Vista. As an insanity check, download and installation of SW:TOR in the Vista platform proceeded a custom graphics driver installation (driver & control panel only). The game started normally like it did in Windows 7 & 10, but it loaded a bit quicker and when it ran did so very well - much faster than the previous Win7 & 10 installations. There were still frame-drop instances, but performance issues were clearly observed at load times when going into densely populated areas of the game map which is normal; upon loading and updating my screen pretty quickly the game would resume at the expected performance level.

My Vista SW:TOR system was not updated considering the .Net Framework and the MSVCRT files except for those aspects at the discretion of the game installer. My conclusion is, as was previously stated in this thread, that game performance, stability and connectivity issues are low-level and beyond the control of the game. Am unsure of the exact locality of the game's MSVCRT dependencies, but if they are not local to the game installation directory they should be; this locally managed MSVCRT workaround has worked in the past with numerous other games and also works well for DirectX (especially 9c) eliminating lousy overall operations especially when considering WOW64 for 32 bit systems hosting in a 64 bit O.S. Possible considerations include the MSVCRT, DirectX 9c and .Net Framework I including version and installation relative to the game directories.

ST:TOR runs great in Vista, even now after all this time, with nothing g more than what was shipped with the O.S. and installed by the game installation executable. It' s not the game - has to be dependency issues with updated MSVCRT, .Net and DirectX 9c systems.