Thanks everyone. This was my first post, and although there were only a few replies they were all helpful and constructive. I've found that creative labs drivers are notoriously sensitive. At one point, on a whim, I installed the old yamaha midi synth, and my sound card's drivers pooped. I couldn't even boot up. I was getting the evil "msgsrv32" and "devcon32" errors. Wound up fiddling in safe-mode and with ASD and so on, until everything worked again.

Anyway, once I was up and running again, I re-installed FF7 and everything worked perfectly. So case closed.

So thanks again for the help. Nice community you've got here.