Creative Sound Blaster 5.1 VX - Sound card - 5.1 - PCI [PC]

Title : Creative Sound Blaster 5.1 VX - Sound card - 5.1 - PCI [PC]
ASIN : B003AHC5SK
Description : Quality surround audio for music

List Price : £14.99
Price : £14.99

category: Internal Sound Cards
brand: Creative
Item Page Detail URL : link
Rating : 4.0
Review : Worked in the end
I bought this card because I'd been having trouble with the onboard sound on my Asus A8N-SLI motherboard since upgrading to Windows 7 64-bit.

I bought the card from another online retailer and it wasn't packed very well. I suspect Amazon would have sent it in a box at least.

Steps I took:
Downloaded the most up to date driver for the SoundBlaster 5.1 VX from the Creative Website (driver dated July 2009).
Powered down the pc and installed the card in a white PCI slot.
Powered up the PC and installed the drivers followed by another restart.
Spent three hours trying to get the card working right.

First thing to note, having installed the card, Windows 7 recognised the new hardware on start-up and started searching for the best drivers on windows update. I cancelled this as I wanted the proper Creative drivers.
Went through the Creative driver set-up - no problems. Restarted the machine.

My set-up is a standard 2.0...