I didn't find anything at my normal 'sources'. Did find several comments "what is this...I can't find anything out about it", so you've got company. The only place you're likely to get a real answer is at Creative. eMail them.
If I had to make an educated guess, I'd say it's the part of the drivers that allow the CT drivers to run as a service in NT, XP, er Vista... like I said NT. The way to check would be to look on a W9xmachine with the same hardware, prob won't find it there.
Service Mgr, (Admin Tools/Services), will tell you if CTAudSvc.exe has any dependent services or is dependent on any others. If it's dependent on any others, check them out as you might be able to halt them as well. But look for other dependent services they might have. If either has any dependent services, they won't work if you kill 'em.
As an old NT user, (back to 3.51), I can tell you services are something to get to know. If you're mucking around, the best thing to do is set them to manual and then start them or shut them down at your pleasure.
We used to do this when we had a lot of hardware/software on a system - remember, a lot of memory back then was 64mb. The OS has bloated a lot since then, but I know guys that were running the 'new' shell, (Classic, now), on NT 3.51 as a hack before it was available from M$. and only had 64mb
Anyway, with a loaded system, we'd load and unload services as needed to accomplish something. There also used to be a drivers manager that went away with NT 4.0 that had similar function. I can understand upgrading the OS, adding features, and improving usability, but I can't understand why they took away tools to manage the OS - it's just dumb..
There's some sites that will explain all of the services and what's needed if you want to run a 'slim' system - it's a good idea, I still do it. I'll look through my reference stuff & see if I have something related to those sites - if I do, I'll post back here.
I built systems for 13-14 years and I always concentrated on rock solid, no crash systems. I built W9x boxes that never crashed in a controlled business environment, but if the system was a home system that others could load up things on, they'd get flaky right away and start puking. (a good example is my brother messing with my 90 year old mom's system - every time he'd come to visit, I'd have to go down later and 'fix' it)
