Hey, you! Yes, you!
Are you somewhat irked by the noisy splash screen the creative drivers add to Windows? Would you like to disable them?
Yes! Good, then read on!
Having become mildly offended by the audio collision of the Microsoft Sound and the EAX splash screen, I made an educated guess that since there wasn't a setting I could find to turn it off in anything Creative had installed with the drivers, it was probably being done by an app, which meant there were only certain places it could be fired off from. To the Registry!
In this case, it's found in a key in HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run called "CTStartup" "c:\program files\creative\splash screen\cteaxspl.exe /run"
At this point, we can do two things:
The Easy option, is to fire up msconfig and just untick that entry. No more splash screen, no effect on system functionality.
The other option is to do something silly.
After some prodding around the contents of that program's folder, it's pretty obvious that all it really does is play an AVI from the same folder whose name is specified in cteaxspl.ini. There's some basic sanity checking. You can't just slap a file into that folder and replace an entry inside that ini with your file, it'll just ignore it.
HoweverIf we (backup and then) replace Eax_hd.avi with e.g. a 5 second clip from The Princess Bride (no particular reason, I had it handy) that's the right format (cinepak video and PCM audio), the attached now happens when your system boots.
I don't know if there's a limit to how long something played this way could be, but I suspect it's only limited by whatever technical limits cinepak has and the filesize limits of fat32 i.e. none practically speaking. Some guy here's crunched a 15 minute movie into it for a starter: https://www.andrews-corner.org/cinepak.html
Needless to say, I'm not responsible for any shenanigans that happen with this knowledge.
Here's the MPC-BE properties for the original:
General
Complete name : F:\EAX_HD.AVI
Format : AVI
Format/Info : Audio Video Interleave
Format settings : BitmapInfoHeader / PcmWaveformat
File size : 1.93 MiB
Duration : 4 s 238 ms
Overall bit rate : 3 824 kb/s
Frame rate : 29.970 FPS
Video
ID : 0
Format : Cinepak
Codec ID : cvid
Duration : 4 s 238 ms
Bit rate : 2 399 kb/s
Width : 320 pixels
Height : 240 pixels
Audio
ID : 1
Format : PCM
Format settings : Little / Signed
Codec ID : 1
Duration : 4 s 237 ms
Bit rate mode : Constant
Bit rate : 1 411.2 kb/s
Channel(s) : 2 channels
Sampling rate : 44.1 kHz
Bit depth : 16 bits