eradicating drivers?

i've run into some new problems trying to use my creative live 5.1, that being that winxp refuses to use any driver but its own. i've tried everything i can think of to get it to use the drivers i'm trying to install, but when i choose any other one it starts asking for disks and pointing to /user/temp/temp/etc. for the disk/file location.
what i'd like to do is totally get rid of all the drivers listed for this device, including the winxp one. can it be done?

Between the creative driver and the native Windows SB live driver you will not notice any difference in performance because Creative has not updated their drivers since Windows XP was released.

But here are the steps I would take

Have you tried going into the device manager and choosing to uninstall the sound card and then running add/remove hardware in the control panel and when it detects the card choose "search location" for the driver?

Does windows XP recognize the SB Live as what it is? It should

If it does then try using the update driver button from the device properties and if it says it cannot find a better match when you check it against the driver you are trying to install then I would stick with the installed driver.



Edit: I edited the post for clarification

theyve been updated alright, the actual driver is dated 07/24/2002 but the website lists the latest posting as feb of this year. i really needed this driver since its the first one that lets me use my livedrive.

i'm not sure how or why but it works now thanks for the input.

in 2K the drivers are in C:\%systemroot%\system32\drivers
look in device manager on your computer and select the sound card. goto driver details and see which drivers it uses.. make note of what it uses then uninstall the device. then go into the folder where the drivers where located and delete the files it used if they are till there..then reboot your computer. next windows should autodetect the hardware and ask for drivers.. when it does, point it to the folder with the new drivers and it should be fine..

(make sure you backup stuff before hard-deleting drivers cause windows might not like it) I did it with no problem for my sound card and audio/video codecs with no problems but you never know. lemme know how it goes