Hi EP,
Thanks for your friendly words.
I would strongly suggest to use ASIO-drivers instead of any other method whenever working with professional audio software like VE Pro.
It's quite common for built-in audio hardware to do some processing on the original signal when used with their off-the-shelve "multi-media" drivers, starting with re-sampling to different sample rates, equalisation, dynamics processing, stereo-width processing, even some kind of reverberation (!) and so on. More often than not this processing isn't clearly identified and hard (or impossible) to switch off. - The less-than-stellar latency seems to be a negligible problem in this context.
This is even more true with notebooks. I've worked with four different Windows-notebooks during the last few years, and three of them had serious design-flaws in their audio signal paths when used with conventional drivers (wrong routing, excessive noise, signal interruptions, un-identified signal processing like mentioned above, etc.). Funny enough it's easy to overcome these limitations on behalf of the generic ASIO4ALL v2 driver you wrote about. While this won't make the cheap converters and noisy analog components become any better, it at least allows for a controlled signal path between the application and the audio output.
In the end, you ensure you that would be much happier with one of the semi-professional portable audio interfaces you can get nowadays, e.g. RME's "Babyface":
-> http://www.rme-audio.de/en_products_babyface.php
Kind regards,