MSI K7T Pro 2 & SB Live Value Problems

[Four and Twenty 0]

My friend has a MSI K7T Pro 2a motherboard with the shitty via onboard audio built in. He runs Windows Me. The performance of the VIA AC97 audio was not up to par as he uses this machine for gamming and listening to music and the VIA audio has a nasty tendency to skip and occupy a ridiculous amount of cpu time. So I suggested he buy a Sound Blaster Live Value because I had heard good things about them and the price was right. So he gets the card and installs it and disables the via ac97 driver and he doesn’t get any sound out of the sound blaster. All the drivers for the sound blaster are installed and say that they are working correctly with no conflicts. The weird thing is there is no little speaker icon in the sys tray. IN the sound and multimedia options under the audio tab where it lists the preferred devices for playback and recording and MIDI the sound blaster doesn’t show up. But under the devices section the sound blaster shows up and if you open up its properties I has the radio button next to “use sound properties from this device” so I decided that it must be a bios issue and went into the cmos setup and set onchip sound to disabled then reinstalled the sound blaster and nothing changed. Then I uninstalled the sound blaster and moved it from slot 1 to slot 2 and reinstalled the driver. I also tried a bunch of other stuff to numerous to mention. But no matter what the speaker does not show in the sys tray and the sound blaster is not in the list of preferred devices. I am stumped what do it do. Also there is a unknown device listed in the device manager under sound video and game controllers that has always been there. I have not been able to get it to install as I am not sure what it is and what drivers it needs. The only other cards in the sys are an asus v6600 agp and a lucent voice win modem. One other interesting thing is that the wdm for voice modem and Game port for sblive both show up in the preferred devices menu where the sound blaster should be listed. Any ideas on what could be happening here. I feel really shitty for suggesting this card to this kid and having it be such a pain in the *** .