I know you need the original CD for the original Audigy 2, but I don't know about other variants.
Creative has a history of putting out some real crap, but I haven't had much trouble with them. My first Creative products were the SoundBlaster 16 w/IDE connector and a 4x CD-ROM drive. These worked fine on my 486. My AWE32 (which I LOVED) also worked fairly well on my P200. Drivers were a touch flakier for that card (which I still have somewhere). The midi music for TIE Fighter Collector's CD-ROM and Dark Forces was brilliant on that thing.
Next was a Live! and a slew of optical drives for various computers (I think they were a 12x CD-RW, a 12x DVD, and a few 52x CD-ROMs). All of these products caused severe frustration. The Live! played hell with the VIA KT133A chipset, but after enough futzing and driver updates it eventually worked. That card is still operational in my dad's Slackware machine. ALL of the optical drives failed after less than a year. Their Lite-on/TDK replacements continue to function or were cycled out for newer drives.
I talk about all that old stuff because I think that the majority of posters on this forum started to truly encounter Creative products at about the time of the Live! series, and Creative deserves the hate they get for that generation of equipment. I hope it burns forever in computer hell.
Surprisingly, my next Creative card, an Audigy 2, has been very good. The actual drivers were nowhere near as crappy as the Live!'s, but their controls are awful. C'mon, ENABLING CMSS 1 by default? Why would they intentionally make things sound wimpy? That should have been turned off and left off.
In my opinion, the drivers that produce the best sound from the Audigy 2 are the ALSA drivers. If you ever install a Linux variant, check it out. Sound just seems cleaner, and some things, particularly stereo seperation, are considerably better. Plus, installation is a total no-brainer.