New controller

The OP must be referring to this type of pad
Xbox 360 Official Silver Wireless Controller. These controllers have a new elevated D-Pad for more precision. This D-Pad is very useful for games like Street Fighter and Tekken.

I'm pretty sure only the special edition 360 Slims have the new D-Pad controllers in the box. My recent 250GB Slim came with a normal black wireless pad. My nephews Gears of War 3 edition came with the new controller.

Yeah, the pad that came packaged with my Slim definitely had a far superior d-pad to any other 360 pad I've used. I know what you mean about a different 'feel' but the difference is far too significant for that to be the case. I hoped that Microsoft had
actually decided to update all their pads, but I spoke to a technician on here and he said that only the controller that shipped with the Slim had been 'specifically redesigned'. They've offered to send me a controller with the 'good' d-pad if I return my
old (broken) one, but I don't know why they aren't commercially available.

Do you have any other headsets that you could plug into the controller? If no other headsets work, then it should definitely be a problem with the controller itself.

Can you not take/send the controller back to wherever you bought it from and explain that it was the wrong controller? Most reasonable vendors would replace it with the correct one I imagine

Hi Rjc595,

Thank you for coming to the forums today. I'd be happy to help.

When you say that the controller stops working does it disconnect and the light starts flashing or does the controller just not wok when you press buttons in game?

Do you have a micro USB cable to try and wire the controller?

Go ahead and do a
hard reset and power cycle to your Xbox. Hold down the power button on the console for about 10 seconds until it shuts down and then remove the power cable from the Xbox and the power outlet for about 2-3 minutes. Then
re-connect and turn on the Xbox.