So I bought myself a nice new Audigy 2 ZS off of Newegg a short while ago. It got to my dorm and I was happy as could be. I tossed it in a PCI slot, and began to install the drivers. Towards the end of installing the drivers, my computer crashed (restarted itself). That was sort of odd, but nothing heartbreaking; I figured I'd just reinstall the drivers.

However, when I got back into XP, I had all sorts of problems. First of all, I could not get into My Computer or Control Panel. When clicked on, an error along the lines of "Windows could not find the file ("null"), make sure you typed it correctly blah blah blah." The only program I could get to load was Trillian. Eventually I tried disabling onboard sound (which I had been using, AC97) in the BIOS, and that fixed it. However, any attempts to install the drivers for my new sound card were met with the computer crashing.
I tried uninstalling all the drivers and the hardware and going back to onboard sound, but as soon as I reenabled onboard sound, the same problems started happening again. Now whenever I try to install the drivers, it tells me that it cannot detect the sound card and I can't go any further. I went up to Fry's today and bought another Audigy 2 ZS on the off chance it was a bad card, but I get the same error. I know that it's in there nice and tight; I've reseated it a dozen times. Even if it would detect it, I have a feeling it would still crash while trying to install the drivers.

So right now I have no audio. Basically I can't move forward or back: I cannot reenable onboard sound without my computer ****ting itself, and I cannot install the necessary drivers for my new sound card.

Basic Specs:

XP Pro SP1 (anyone think SP2 would make a difference, or reinstalling XP for that matter?)
P4 2.66ghz
ECS L4VXA2 mobo
1 gig of memory (512 of 2700, 512 of 3200)
GeForce 4 Ti-4200 128mb
60 gig IBM Deskstar
200 gig IBM Deskstar
120 gig Western Digital
500 Watt RaidMax PSU