Is IRQ conflicts always evident?

No they are not,you will can never tell until expierence a problem and then you can go to Device Manager and it will give info that the hardware is working properly,it is only evident when you have a conflict or problem that hardware is inoperable and you start troubleshooting to find the cause.

as soulrider mentioned it is hard in certain cases (as yours) to find the conflict since windows is not show what excatly is conflicting. What has worked for me a couple of times it to remove all the devices possible als their driver and start putting them back in one by one. usually starting with the one showing a problem. It might take some trial and error to get the right sequence to have them all work.
Good luck

NO, they are hidden and confused beyond reason sometimes.

First, BIOS settings, Plug and Play Aware OS, set to NO.

PCI PNP setup, give 12, 11, 10, 5 and stay away from assigning 9, then watch the system boot, look at the settings that the motherboard gives to devices and see that they are separate and no two share one IRQ, which is tricky too because some slots are shared on some motherboards, so you may need to remove and reinstall into a different slot ...

Now boot into Win98 and check that the device manager has the same info regarding the device/motherboard given IRQ assignments.

Disable DMA for the CD drive(s) too, because that may be the real problem all along, only manifest since the new NIC as it will actually use the DMA feature, if possible.

Hope this helps ...

Well thanks guys,

Your input did help me solve the problem.

I wasn't aware that existing conflicts weren't reported thoroughly by the device manager (Shouldn't this be "fixed" by MS ?)

Although going back in the DMA settings for the sound card i did notice "i"s in the icon but then changing the DMA chanel got rid of them but the SB wasn't operating still.

I fiddled with assigning IRQ's manually, even going in the BIOS to get rid of a COM2 and a reserved IRQ for VGA (What does that later one do? I didn't notice any difference after disabling it.) I was at it for at least 1 hour, restarting the system maybe 20 times)

I had also un-installed both cards to re-sequence the installation, that didn't do...

Then while in the BIOSI learned that the IRQ's where assigned on a per slot method and that it could be manually changed.

As the last post prior to this answer suggests (Sorry forgot to remember the name before posting ;0(

So I thought of changing the slot for the NIC going from PCI 5 to PCI 1 (without deleting the NIC in the device manager) when fired-up windows re-recognised the NIC and assigned it another IRQ and my SB was assigned IRQ #5 and is now happy and running fine!!!

Ouf!

Thanks again

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