HOWTO: Audigy 2 ZS driver inst

Question

This seems to be a common problem. I first found this board because I was trying to solve it myself and was shocked that such a basic thing like installing a driver was so difficult with this card. I also noticed that all of the advice creative provides doesn't seem to work for most people. Anyway, the following is how I solve the problem, your mileage may vary.
Firstly, let me make sure everyone understands that I had just performed a fresh install of Windows XP with Service Pack 2 on a brand new Dell Dimension 8400.
The symptoms I were experiencing were as follows:
Windows XP was detecting the card and the game port, but was unable to find a driver in its database. The card was showing up in "Device Manager" as "Multimedia Audio Device" and the game port was showing up as "PCI Input Device". When I tried to install creative's driver, I received an error message saying that the card was not present in the system.
I gave the creative troubleshooting steps a try (removing/replacing the board, etc) but nothing worked. I resolved the issue in the following way:
. Make sure that the card is in the 3rd PCI slot.
2. Boot into XP as normal and let the hardware detection wizard fail (it won't find the drivers anyway...)
3. Download the EAX 4.0 driver from creative's site. You can probably use any driver that doesn't require anything else. That is, make sure the driver requirements only say something like, "Windows XP and SB Audigy 2 ZS card" in the details section.
4. The driver is packaged as a self extracting executable, however after unpacking the actual driver it checks to see if the sound card is physically installed, if this check fails the driver will be deleted from its temporary location. This, obviously, sucks if the check is failing. So, when you double click the EXE file let it unpack everything and do its little check. BUT DO NOT CLICK ON THE "OK" BUTTON WHEN IT SHOWS THE ERROR MESSAGE. Just let it sit there.
5. Open the device manager and you should see the "Multimedia Audio Device" listing with a yellow exclamation point next to it. Right click it and then select "Update Driver".
6. You should now be in the hardware installation wizard. Select the "No, I'll install from a specific location" choice.
7. When prompted for a search location, click the "Browse" button and try to find a directory that looks similar to "C:\WINDOWS\temp\0cxxxx\WDM" and left click it. If you have the right directory the "OK" button should become acti've. If so, click it. If you can't find the right directory, then try searching for "WDM" in the C:\WINDOWS\temp" folder.
8. The creative driver install should now proceed smoothly.
9. Repeat steps 5-8 for the "PCI Input Device" listing. Both drivers are in the same directory.
0. It may not prompt you to, but just for fun reboot your machine. You should have sound when you start back up.

Answer 1

I have a great idea. How about instead of all this rigamaroo to get the driver installer to work WHY DOESN'T CREATIVE MAKE A PROPER DRIVER INSTALLER! I mean HELLO! Where is the Creative techs on this issue?
I found the temp dir, I think it's CTF00 or somethin like that (it's the only file that pops up in the temp dir when I try the installer). Found the WDM file and hit OK. The updater tells me there was no updated file.
I am doing this from Device Manager->Sound, video and game controllers->Creative SB Audigy 2 Zs (WDM)
NADA, no luck. So I say WTF! Isn't this company big enough to have a team of techies to solve problems like this for their customers?
I need to update my drivers.