Installing new sound card - problems

I got a nice pair of Surround Sound headphones, and realized that to use them with my onboard AC'97 I would have to use my mic jack, which is a problem for games with VoIP. So I ordered a cheap sound card - a Chaintech AV-512. I've never installed a sound card before and didn't realize that I had to disable my onboard sound first. So I tried installing the drivers from the CD and my rundll32 started taking 95+ CPU cycles, and everything was running slowly. The "copying files" bit finished but it hung up at the ""waiting for audio drivers to become available" bit. I restarted, and got stuck at the bootscreen, so I hit my reset button and restarted with the "last settings that worked". I downloaded the latest drivers, and this time my CPU was left alone but I got stuck at the same "waiting for audio drivers to become available" bit. Same reset process. I then went online and looked stuff up, and then went into my BIOS and disabled the onboard sound. Drivers froze again. So I uninstalled all nTune, nvMixer, and the nForce audio drivers from my system...same problem. One time, and one time only, it told me the driver had installed and I needed to restart, so I did, but when I restarted I still had "No device found" in my sound settings. I've tried various combinations of installing these about six times now, and the driver installation always freezes on that same "waiting..." part...if I go into Add/Remove programs I have "PCI Audio Driver" there, but Windows doesn't seem to be using them, perhaps because the installation never finishes. I have uninstalled the "PCI Audio Driver" each time before trying to reinstall it BTW, that doesn't help.

Also, when it gets to the "waiting..." part my mouse freezes and either my ethernet connection or whatever monitors it dies - My up/down traffic speeds being reported in Samurize go from actual speeds to an "[Error: " message.

So, if anyone can point me in the right direction (which right now seems to be a SB Live, but if I can get this card working, great) I would really appreciate it.


AOpen AK89 Max (nForce 3 150)
Athlon 64 3000
2x512MB Corsair Value RAM
MSI Radeon 9800 Pro
Chaintech AV-512
XP Home SP2