Creative Sound Blaster Audigy SE

This sound card came with my new PC in nov 06.it was a troublesome card from the start, lots of unnecessary software on the disk that is no particular use unless you want to alter all kinds of EAX settings.
On games like oblivion it would grind to a halt after five minutes with shuddering sound that rendered the game unplayable, this happened with lots of other games too.
If you use youtube or similar you may experience that after the 3rd or fourth video is clicked on will start making the sound stutter again, always resulting in the need to reboot the computer.
I struggled for a couple of months trying to find the issue with this even with clean booting, I am a very experienced PC user and my PC is high end, all the drivers were updated and my system is clean so it was not a hardware issue.
I installed a SB 16 bit soundcard which then ran absolutely perfectly.
After searching online I found that many were having issues similar to mine with this card and had ditched it while others seemed happy with it.
I suspect that it is simply a "fickle" card that is kind a lottery in wether it will work or not, so please be warned the sound for me was distorted and scratchy and slowed down applications and eventually ground a dual core P2.4g 4 meg of ram Gforce 8800GTX to a halt and would only be corrected by constant reboots.
I am still currently using my nine year old 16 bit soundcard with no problems at all which is better than my onboard sound, despite my onboard sound performing better than the Audigy!