I have been working with Creative Tech Support for now hoping to get this resolved. All this is with the latest driver from the Creative website and I have everything installed correctly. If I let the computer go into sleep mode I lose the soundcard again and must do multiple reboots all over again. And if I do get it working and decide to switch from headphones to speakers and back again it kills a song playing on YouTube and if during a game, the game freezes. Sometimes it appears as a 'SB Recon 3D' which I have never owned.

My computer needs to be rebooted multiple times to get the card recognized. But I have had a much bigger issue with the AE-9 since I first installed it. It too would not play the audio in browser videos until I ran the troubleshooter and it discovered the codecs needed updating. I did not want to go through the wringer trying to rescue my ZxR as I have a set of legacy computers for my computer hobby. So I checked the driver updates and as the OP discovered found them to be quite old. Well, after getting everything installed and going through the driver update phase I discovered my ZxR will not play the audio in any browser videos no matter which one I use. I kept my ZxR thinking it would work just fine. I recently upgraded my computer with a new motherboard, CPU, RAM, and cooler while also upgrading from Win7 Pro to Win10 64 Pro.

Sound blaster z no sound windows 10