To make things as concise as possible:

I have an ALC882 in my laptop that should be capable of 44.1kHz bit-perfect output via its optical SPDIF. The particular model is capable of Dolby Digital Live, and, to ensure that it works, the XP drivers resample everything to 48kHz and lock the optical to 48kHz, whether it is enabled or not. I guess Realtek were only concerned about the chip meeting the HD Audio specs in Vista.

There are no problems as far as the SPDIF goes in Vista. I can choose any of the sample rates that the hardware is supposed to support, and testing using my receiver I confirmed that it does actually operate at 44.1, 48, 96, or whatever is selected. I haven't been able to verify whether it is actually bit-perfect because there are no exclusive mode apps for Vista yet.

Since Vista kinda blows and I can't currently get bit-perfect from it anyway, can anyone think of any possible method by which I might evade the arbitrary 48kHz resampling/48kHz optical lock, by tricking the driver and application into thinking I have a different variant of the ALC882, or whatever? I tried editing the INFs to achieve that effect, but no luck

Why does it matter? I thought people wanted bit perfect output so they could do DD? It sounds like you have DD, so isn't it rather a moot point? Or is there some other use for it?

The HTPC crowd want DTS and AC3 pass-through, but I am more interested in bit-perfect pass-through of 44.1kHz stuff - CD audio.

Dolby Digital Live is real-time encoding/upmixing to 5.1 AC3; not pass-through of streams on a DVD or whatever. Naturally I don't want an existing DTS/AC3 to be re-encoded, and I really do not want ordinary 16-bit, 44.1kHz stereo PCM to go through a lossy encode as well as an upmix to faux-5.1.