Very low sounds

I recently re-installed my windows98se, and obviously had
to reinstall my drivers as well. I downloaded my video/and
sound drivers, and everything was working well for about a
week. And now I can hardly hear any more sounds. I have to
turn the volume up very high just to make out the sounds.
I have a creativelabs soundblaster live, I have my volume
turned on and everything is running in the volume icon in
the taskbar. When things play I can see they are playing,
I can see the "playing" bar moving. And I dont get an
error message.what could be the problem?