The exact message was: "Setup is unable to locate a supported product on your system. blah blah."
Nothing wrong with the hardware. It worked fine when i was playing Halo and Wolfenstein not 5 mins before i tried installing the driver. The driver i DLd actually encompasses the entire range of Audigy products from the original through to 4 and SE variants so that can't be the problem either. I'm in the process of DLing another 3rd party driver (i think i've breached the download limit. Slow as.) so i'll see if that one makes any difference before resorting to sys-restore.
I'm not
too worried about lost data with the restore as i've not done anything with it for over a month. At worst, i may have to reinstall FEAR.
I'll see how it goes. Thanks B.