That's not a solution, that's the goal Creative seems to have with their lack of support on Audigy cards.
I agree. It's sad that Creative resorts to such crap to get us end users to have to buy new freaking cards if we want support. And sadly, it is a solution. It's the only solution. The Audigy series of cards are horribly broken (driver-wise), and Creative won't fix them. But they will/have fixed up the X-Fi, and have done so quite nicely. Believe me, I suffered through ALL the Creative Audigy series.
Besides that, the audio quality of the Audigy cards themself are just fine, the X-Fi just has more hardware acceleration and effects.
Sorry, this is not correct. The amps on the X-Fi are by far superior to the Audigy series (hardware). There are hardly, if any, effects, going on here.
Bottom line for the OP. If he wants to fix his problem and get the best/flawless performance to boot, he's going to want to upgrade to the X-Fi. Other than that, he'll keep having problems, or, worse, he can switch to a different brand, and have other problems which I've seen crop up on different forums.