Creative software & drivers are usually ok, unless of course you run an o/s from this century. It is possible that along with your Creative software & drivers bundle you have auto update installed or that your windows update has loaded a new driver/software onto the system.
You could try to roll back to the previous driver or even uninstall your soundcard, run cc cleaner & reinstall it. Should take no more than 30 minutes to do. I'm running an xfi extreme audio & have had to do this repeatedly in Vista & windows 7, just to get the bugger working.