I was having the same problems with this driver/app and have just solved it reasonably painlessly. My system tray icons were taking an age to appear on bootup, and I was getting the 'DEVLDR not responding' error and hang on switching off. Fixed thus:

Booted into Safe Mode
Re-ran the LiveDrvUni-Pack(ENG) downloaded from the Creative website
Chose the 'Repair the previous installation option'
Waited while all was updated (the 'Updating Windows drivers' took the longest - about 2 minutes)
After everything was complete, rebooted as instructed
Hey Presto - no long delays on booting for the System Tray items, and immediate shutdown when requested with no DEVLDR problems/hangs. I do have the CTHelper.exe running now according to Task Manager, but no problems so far.

Hope this may help somebody out there !! Good Luck !!

Jeff

PS. If anyone from Creative Labs and/or Microsoft are out there listening, can you please sort these problems out as both the hardware and software have been out long enough now for us poor users to not have to put up with this sort of thing any more. I will most definitely not be buying any further Creative hardware in the future, nor will I recommend them to anyone. Has anyone got any recommendations for a different soundcard (equivalent to the Live 5.1 Platinum) for next time for me ???