Problem with a creative X-fi notebook on my dell c-840

The problem I'm having with my creative Xfi notebook is that my system is a dell c-840 latitude and the card is a expresscard 34 device and the dell has pcmcia slots... so i bought a pcmcia/expresscard adapter.. i guess its supposed to go thru the usb bus... the very first time i installed it windows xp pro recognized the device and installed ok.. then i was trying the wireless receiver feature and it crashed so i uninstalled it to reinstall but now every time it won't recognize the device... and since it doesn't recognize the device it wont let me install the software or drivers because it says no creative products found on the system...it recognizes the adapter ok but not the x-fi device.... windows device manager has a yellow flag on the unkown usb device and says windows had a problem with it .. it's not working properly..i had a similar prob after removing the motherboard for a ac jack repair with both cd drives no longer being recognized and i found a tip from someone on here about editing the registry and the fix worked is this the same problem here with the x-fi device?? any advise i sure could use..... i'm out the 80 bucks for the x-fi and the 50 bucks for the adapter at this point..i have sent several emals to creative tech support and they are clueless about any help...