Hey, Aaronfire7, welcome to the forum!
There was a known problem of incompatibility of some of PCMCIA controllers with the Audigy ZS Notebook due to incorrect implementation of the controllers themselves (the problem was not the card).
Quick googling brought this thread https://www.dell.com/community/en/conversatio … 4ccf8a8dec6f7e7
Looks like Dell laptops were also affected. What PCMCIA controller does your laptop have?

Device Manager states that it's a Texas Instruments PCI-4150 CardBus Controller with the following Hardware IDs:

PCI\VEN_104C&DEV_AC44&SUBSYS_01631028&REV_02
PCI\VEN_104C&DEV_AC44&SUBSYS_01631028
PCI\VEN_104C&DEV_AC44&CC_060700
PCI\VEN_104C&DEV_AC44&CC_0607

Unfortunately I can't find the original message about this problem on Creative's site. There was a list of affected controllers, quite a few of them actually, IIRC.
EDIT: Ah, there it is https://web.archive.org/web/20050422013526/ht … ok/notebook.asp

Known Incompatibilities:

There have been reported compatibility problems with PCMCIA Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS Notebook and the PCMCIA controllers listed below. Creative Labs is currently working with the respective PCMCIA controller chipset manufacturers to develop solutions that would improve the performance of notebook systems with these chipsets. These updates will be available at www.soundblaster.com.

ENE Tech CB1411
Ricoh R5C476(II)
Ricoh R5C475(II)
TI PCI-1520

I see.

Is there a way to fix the issue or am I going to have to wait for an update?

Update: I've been scanning around on eBay and other places for a different laptop and I've found the Dell Latitude C610.

I looked at the service manual for the computer and apparently the PCMCIA controller is a TI PCI 1420 CardBus controller.

Would this work?

You never know until you try. At least TI PCI 1420 works in a Thinkpad T23 according to Creative's compatibility list.
My card works fine in my Thinkpad X60s with Ricoh RL5C476 controller.

Awesome.

I've purchased a C610 from eBay and should get it in a couple of days. Hopefully it works 🤞

Does an unknown sound device appear in device manager when the Audigy card is installed? If not I think the cardbus slot is not working correctly or the card may be dead.

The notebook's cardbus controller can cause problems but it's usually more along the lines of audio quality issues. The Audigy drivers have the ability to toggle the card into a dumb codec mode to bypass most of that but you lose most of the fancy Audigy features.

Haven't checked in a few days but I don't think anything came up as unknown (Sound or PCMCIA related).

Not sure if I've mentioned this before but I've never tested the PCMCIA slot in the computer I've been using it with before, so it may very well be the slot. I'm not entirely sure, but hopefully I'll have it answered when my Dell C610 arrives.

I got the C610 today. Tried installing the drivers from Vogons and it didn't work. I got the exact same error as last time, despite the PCMCIA controller supposedly being supported by Creative?

At this point, I don't know what the problem is.

Did you try the drivers directly from the Creative website?
https://support.creative.com/downloads/search … =sb0530&nPage=3

I looked through the page you linked to but there were none listed for Windows XP (The OS that the C610 is running).

Would a Win 7 driver work?

EDIT: I'm stupid I didn't read the descriptions.

Tried pretty much all of the drivers and all of them gave the exact same error.