Why won’t my A drive work?

I built a computer with a Shuttle AI61 motherboard and an AMD Athlon 800MHz CPU.
The A drive will not read a floppy. It’s OK on start up, I can boot from it.
I have replaced, one at a time, the cable, the drive, the drivers, the motherboard, and the OS (was Windows 98, is Windows Me).
When I try to read a floppy, the drive light comes on, it sounds like it’s reading the disk, and then the system freezes up, and the computer has to be rebooted.
Any ideas would be helpful.