Alternative to Creative drivers?

I'm about to upgrade to an Audigy 2 and I was wondering if there are any recommended third party drivers for it that I could experiment with, since I've heard so many awful things about Creative's own drivers.

Thanks

I know three good reasons:

1) creative drivers eat system performance on the 'old' live platinum card I currently have.

2) as far as I know: ALL creative soundcards work terribly on ALL systems with hyperthreading enabled. This problem is kwown for months and they don't do a thing about it. Lots of plops and interruptions and because of that some games don't play sound very well, bad video and/or audio playback in powerdvd, windvd and so on.
Disable hyperthreading in bios: all problems disappeared.

3) Driver installation is terribly. Lots of unpredictable stuff going on. I had to reinstall my computer four time to get the card working. Everty time I installed exactly the same drivers in exactly the same order: everytime another result with the soundcard: mixer would work, mixer did work but digital out was disabled, digital out finally working but other inputs muted themself on system reboot. On the fourth installation everything worked *finally*.
On another machine, all sound options worked fine after two installations but joystick port wouldn't function correctly. Never been able to fix that.

Oh, creative support sucks too, I have been contacting them several times, explaining exactly in FULL details what I did, what I tried, what went good, what went wrong... and the only things they could say to me was "Did you install the latest drivers?", "Have you enabled the digital out?", "Did you plug in your joystick before or after your computer started?".. come on