PCI bus hogging
Soundblaster Live! causes contention with certain motherboards which can result in crashes, data corruption, and in some cases hard disk failure.

When this sound card was first released it was praised for being "high quality" and other mundane reasons.  It was pretty much the only 3D supporting sound device that did the job well and Creative Labs bought their competitors Ensoniq and Aureal, making them almost the only sound card maker overall.

Soundblaster Live! on a Windows 95, 98, 98SE, or ME system requires that nothing lurks on IRQ 5 and that "PCI Delayed Transaction" should definitely be disabled.  If the delayed transaction is enabled the sound card will cause data corruption and may cause IBM DTLA hard disks to fail (don't even try this with IBM GXP drives as they fail pretty much on their own anyway).

Do not install this sound card on Intel 440BX-based or Via 693-based (Apollo Pro 133), or Via 694DP-based (Apollo Pro Dual Processor) chipsets.  Data corruption and other nasty things happen with this card on these systems.  694DP will make the card deliver very loud concussive noises if you happen to play games on a dual-CPU system and will frequently blue screen or freeze, chew up your disk, and whatnot.

Throw it away and buy a new one
There is a workaround for some of the issues involving the SB Live but unfortunately the links I had will no longer work.  There is a utility written by George Breese that remedies SB Live latency issues but I went and bought a Turtle Beach Santa Cruz to replace the SB Live, which now adorns a parts bench at a local computer shop.

Throwing it away and buying a new card is the best remedy for this situation.