Yanno, for the last 2 weeks I have been beating my head against a wall trying to get back in the air, and failing miserably. Then one comment makes it all come together. At the mention of the AC-97 onboard sound chip I thought I have that, although its disabled and I havent used it in some time. But maybe I should recheck my drivers one more time. Cant hurt right? Everything seemed fine, but as I started looking at the properties of the driver files, to my horror I see several are "unknown", and others had odd dates like 1980! I stripped them out, reinstalled, and got the same thing. So I thought, well maybe thats supposed to be like that. So I ran my DxDiagnostic again, and concentrated on the sound. Sure enough, system locked and rebooted. Checked the drivers on the CD that came with the sound card, the drivers ON THE CD are corrupted. Or at least flawed. Creative puts two different versions of drivers on the CDs. one set are WDM drivers, designed for WinXP. The other set are VXD designed for Win98. When I first bought the card, I used the WDM drivers, and they worked ok. But there is a warning for Win98SE users bundled in with the CD that you may take performance hits if you use these so the put the older VXD drivers on as well. And they are bad. I reinstalled the WDM drivers, and now AHII works fine. Not as good as it will once I get the new system built, but its satisfactory. Creative is sending me a new CD. I appreciate yall listening to me whine for awhile.
