Geforce 970 disabled my sound card!!

Question

Hello everybody! This post is my first one in the forums. Nice to make all of your acquaintances!
My issue is the following. My system is an X58 board, and it had an old Geforce 9800 as well as a Sound blaster Z Card. Everything was working perfectly, without any issue whatsoever. I recently upgraded my video card for an MSI 970 GTX 4G. When I installed the card drivers, I allowed them to install Nvidia HD Audio. Big mistake 
Nvidia HD Audio installed a whole heap of HDMI devices, for some reason made my Sound Blaster device disappear from the device manager, and now Windows cannot even detect my sound card! And I don´t even use the HDMI connector! I use DVI! 
The steps that I have taken to try the correct the issue are the following:
1) Set my preferred audio device to the Sound Blaster in the Audio Control Panel. Result: Does not work, since the Sound Blaster is not even being detected by Windows.
2) Uninstall and reinstall the 970, but without selecting Nvidia HD Audio. Result: No dice; Windows now installs generic drivers for the Nvidia devices, and it still will not recognize my sound blaster.
3) Reformat!!!  Result: Fail, Windows still does not recognize my Sound Blaster, and it still installs generic drivers for the Nvidia Audio by default.
4) Disable and reenable onboard sound in the BIOS. Does not really help because that works on the crappy Realtek integrated card that my board includes, for which I precisely bought the Sound Blaster to replace.
5) The only way my Sound Blaster works again is by completely removing the 970 and going back to my old 9800. So the card works; it is not fried.
So it is pretty safe to assume that the culprit is the 970, which is causing some sort of hardware conflict. I have seen various users complain about the same thing with nvidia cards when doing a Google Search. However, no proposed solution in the forums has brought me any luck in my case.
So Nvidia and MSI, what the heck? If this problem has been going on for years and in various occasions, shouldn´t you guys have a fix for it already? And most importantly for me, how can I fix it in my case??? The 970 works great as a video card, but who made you guys think that it is an audio card too?? 
My specs:
XFX X58i
i7-920 stock clocks
12 Gb RAM
Samsung 840 Evo 256
Sound Blaster Z
Old: EVGA Geforce 9800 1GB
New: MSI GTX 970 4G
850W PSU, XFX Black Edition
Windows 7 Pro 64bit

Answer 1

Hi Nichrome! Thanks for your answer!
Thankfully, I was able to solve the issue. Apparently what caused the problem was that in this particular motherboard, you can´t just arbitrarily plug a pcix card in any slot; they have to follow a certain order. I had the 970 in the first slot and the sound card in the third slot, because I wanted the fans on the 970 to be unobstructed. But I switched the sound card to the second slot and voila! Problem solved.
Just to be safe, and for whoever else might be reading this post, when reinstalling everything, I installed the geforce with generic drivers first and then disabled the generic hd audio device that installs automatically. Only after that did I plug the sound card and installed it without any problem. When installing the Nvidia drivers, I made sure to NOT install the HD Audio stuff. Holding a rosary and garlic, as well as threatening the pc with a wooden stake also seemed to help!