WU installed the wrong soundblaster driver - card no longer works

I have a Soundblaster Z series card for use with Cubase. Today there was no sound. I looked in device manager and it was listed as a different card - Recon3D. Updates confirmed the wrong driver had been installed today.

I've uninstalled + reinstalled the card about 10 times today using the SB installer, manually in device manager, using Revo etc (all with restarts) and nothing will make the card operate. I've tried different PCI-e. The card either reverts to thinking its the Recon3D or shows as SB-Z but doesn't work - I get the message 'the current selected audio device is disabled, not present, not supported by the application or has unplugged jack connections'. I also tried a system restore but still zilch.

While I was doing the above, I disabled auto driver updates in gpedit - to no avail.

The Creative forum says this is a common problem. Creative say it's a WU issue. Either way I can't play my keyboard.

A Windows 10 reinstall would be a major hassle. Any ideas ?

badcrc said:

I have a Soundblaster Z series card for use with Cubase. Today there was no sound. I looked in device manager and it was listed as a different card - Recon3D. Updates confirmed the wrong driver had been installed today.

I've uninstalled + reinstalled the card about 10 times today using the SB installer, manually in device manager, using Revo etc (all with restarts) and nothing will make the card operate. I've tried different PCI-e. The card either reverts to thinking its the Recon3D or shows as SB-Z but doesn't work - I get the message 'the current selected audio device is disabled, not present, not supported by the application or has unplugged jack connections'. I also tried a system restore but still zilch.

While I was doing the above, I disabled auto driver updates in gpedit - to no avail.

The Creative forum says this is a common problem. Creative say it's a WU issue. Either way I can't play my keyboard.

A Windows 10 reinstall would be a major hassle. Any ideas ?

I would go to settings an choose go back to previous version of Windows and see if that fixes it, but you only have 10 days to do that I think. I had a few problems with the latest WU 1709 I believe and reverted back to 1703.

I decided to install the Soundblaster card (and Cubase etc) in a different pc, and everything works fine - showing that the card wasn't faulty, it was a Windows driver update problem. It seems that once the wrong driver has given the SB card a different ID, it sticks and even uninstalling the wrong driver doesn't fix it. According to the Creative forum, this SB + WU problem has been around for a few years, but Microsoft haven't addressed the issue.

Weekly Macrium backups from now on.

badcrc said:

I decided to install the Soundblaster card (and Cubase etc) in a different pc, and everything works fine - showing that the card wasn't faulty, it was a Windows driver update problem. It seems that once the wrong driver has given the SB card a different ID, it sticks and even uninstalling the wrong driver doesn't fix it. According to the Creative forum, this SB + WU problem has been around for a few years, but Microsoft haven't addressed the issue.
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Weekly Macrium backups from now on.

Yep....this started back in windows 8/8.1. I experienced this with AMD driver for my XFX AMD 6970D. It would install the windows generic 1.0 driver and would kill my sound.