Following up on the volume label question, a quick check of INT 21h AH=4Eh in the released MS-DOS source makes it clear that while it happens to support searching for a volume label, it's not designed for that. There is no check in INT 21h AH=4Eh whatsoever for the volume label bit, there is only the assumption that the results should be parsed and converted to a 8.3 filename, and therefore, volume labels will be munged into an 8.3 filename too.

Which is apparently what Creative's INSTALL.EXE program expects to happen.

https://github.com/joncampbell123/doslib/issues/79