Windows 7 - Reinstall goes nowhere?

I've narrowed my troubles with XPM down to the sound card. It's a SoundBlaster External Live! (SB0490). Once the drivers (only) are installed, device manager shows the card just fine. But trying a Restart in XPM I get a seemingly permanent "Shutting down the virtual machine..." I suspect this means the card is a dead end; it may not be worth the time trying to make the $^^&%*^$ thing work.

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Turns out there is a beta driver for the SB0490 that, at least in my Windows 7 environment, allows recording vinyl. Had to do a search on the file name 'cuz the link at the Creative site had no file. Found the file in Turkey!

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