Originally posted by archaos
...NEW INFO - I have in one of my computers another *ISA* card(not Soundblaster) and the same happens with it. Win2k recognizes the card - new hardware found - automatically installs the Windows WDM drivers and although everything seems fine(no conflicts reported) the sound does not work... I got to the conclusion that it's not a drivers problem... it must be some specific setting in the BIOS that should be changed in Win2k when working with ISA CARDS or maybe I'm doing something really stupid .....
Or maybes Windows is doing something stupid !!

I put the bit 'windows wdm drivers' in bold .... I did this as there are two types of sound drivers, WDM - windows direct media & VXD - Virtual eXtended device .... odds are here, that the WDM driver won't work, for exactly the reasons you say, either the card or the motherboard doesn't truely comply to ACPI and thus isn't really plug & play, nearly but not quite ....

You want to use (& I know it sounds stupid !) 95 drivers for it (they will be vxd type drivers), when it detects the hardware point it to the '95 driver instead of the 2k driver ....

Strictly speaking the isa bus isn't supported in windows 2000 ... at the risk of going against my usual ethics (fix it or die ) I feel honour bound to point out that a pci soundcard as good or much better than your card can be had for about $12 ......