  We employ the recently introduced Geometric Phase Propagator Approach (GPPA)
[Phys. Rev. A85, 062110 (2012)] to develop an improved perturbative scheme for
the calculation of life times in driven quantum systems. This incorporates a
resummation of the contributions of virtual processes starting and ending at
the same state in the considered time interval. The proposed procedure allows
for a strict determination of the conditions leading to finite life times in a
general driven quantum system by isolating the resummed terms in the
perturbative expansion contributing to their generation. To illustrate how the
derived conditions apply in practice, we consider the effect of driving in a
system with purely discrete energy spectrum, as well as in a system for which
the eigenvalue spectrum contains a continuous part. We show that in the first
case, when the driving contains a dense set of frequencies acting as a noise to
the system, the corresponding bound states acquire a finite life time. When the
energy spectrum contains also a continuum set of eigenvalues then the bound
states, due to the driving, couple to the continuum and become quasi-bound
resonances. The benchmark of this change is the appearance of a Fano-type peak
in the associated transmission profile. In both cases the corresponding
life-time can be efficiently estimated within the reformulated GPPA approach.
