Problem with Creative SB Audigy 2 ZS applications and Windows XP SP3

[elny]

I have the exact same audio card with no issues at all. Try the older drivers. I had one weird bug with the new drivers not remembering Mic Boost.

Hi Tarun

Just to be sure. Here is attached photo of my sound card. It's SB0350 version of Audigy 2 ZS card.

Edited September 3, 2008 by elny

[elny]

Hi All.

I think I sorted my problem. And the solution so far appears to be incredibly simple but I have no any clear explanation to this. All I had to do is to install Creative software applications directly from CD. By the way, the CD itself does not have to be original, I used CloneCD to make identical copy of original CD and it also worked fine.

Now let me explain what I did that lead me to the problem. I perfer to keep all drivers and programs on hard drive instead of looking for original manufactures CDs every time I need to reinstall Windows and the rest of software. Saves me lot of time, easier to access, always at the reach of a few mouse clickes. My own habbit played bad joke on me. As briefly said above, Creative software applications must be installed from the CD!

A bit of details of the experiments I tried. If you copy setup folders with all files of the following applications: Creative Graphic Equalizer, Creative Speaker Settings, Creative Surround Mixer, EAX Console from CD to hard drive or USB flash drive or another CD and try to install from this new alternative location then this will lead to the problem I was experiencing all this time. At first, I thought that if I could create same folder structure, for example, X:\Audio\SurMixer for SurroundMixer application (where X is your CD/DVD driver letter) as on the CD then installing the appication from this location would work. But it didn't! Whatever I tried the only way that worked was directly from CD.

However it does not matter if the sound card driver was installed from the CD or hard drive or other location (I tried also USB flash drive). I tested the original CD driver and also SBAX_WBUP2_LB_2_09_0016.exe. And I tried to deploy second one on its own as well as after installing on top of the first one. These two both worked fine on their own and the second one above the first one. I also tried SBAX_PCDRV_LB_2_18_0001.exe and all Creative applications apart from Creative Graphic Equalizer worked ok (Creative Graphic Equalizer reported "Out of memory" and did not run).

To soap it up:

1) install sound card driver from any location you want (for Windows XP Pro 32-bit I can't recommend SBAX_PCDRV_LB_2_18_0001.exe driver update as it caused problem);

2) install software applications only directly from original CD (or its identical copy).

The below is a screen-shot I took on 23rd September 2008, it's nLite-d Windows XP Pro SP3 32-bit. As you can see, no problems!

If you still have problems of the described in this thread kind please do post them here. Otherwise please open new thread. Good luck to you all.

Edited September 28, 2008 by elny