I have the biggest stumper of a problem you ever have seen.

Asus A7V
TBird 1GHz
VisionTek GF2MX 32MB
SBLive Value
128MB PC133 CAS2
20.5GB HDD (Pri Master)
LS-120 Floptical drive (Seconday Master)
48x CDROM (Promise Controller Pri Master)
Acer 4x4x32 CDRW (Promise Controller Sec Master)
Diamond SupraMax PCI Modem
300W Power Supply
W98SE

I upgraded this sytem from a KA7 and Athlon 700 thinking my problems were due to a bad motherboard. What was going on was, Windows would run just fine, but once I fired up any game it would lock randomly anywhere from 20 seconds in the game to over an hour.

I checked for overheating and am not OCing. I tried reinstalling windows, all the latest drivers, nothing works.

I bought a new motherboard and CPU and reinstalled everything AGAIN. All new drivers and everything again. This time the games don't lock up but spontaneously quit to the desktop. Diablo II will beep at me and lock (the beep I think is a windows error), UT will kick me to the desktop with a GPF, Worms Armageddon will just spontaneously kick me to the desktop.

If I disable sound drivers my games run stable, but what fun is that? I have tried reinstalling the drivers, trust me. I've tried every conventional method of fixing this thing.

Another thing I've noticed now, whenever I try to defrag my disk it will stop responding and I will have to press my reset button.

Drivers:
VIA drivers, installed the 4 needed drivers not including the DMA one, downloaded separately from their website because the versions were slightly newer than the 4in1 4.25a package.
Det3 6.31 drivers, coolbits registry enabled
SBLive Liveware 3.0 with the Creative Driver update for W98
Installed DirectX 8 but downloaded a DX uninstaller and reinstalled 7.0a. Both don't work.

I have reinstalled windows 4 times now, and have reinstalled drivers god knows how many times. I tried disabling the SB16 emulation and all that, tried checking for overheats, scanned for viruses, reinstalled reinstalled reinstalled, replaced every component of hardware in my system with identical counterparts save my HD, CDrom, LS120 and CDRW, mobo and CPU (Which I bought new ones for). Even changed out the PS, tried reinstalling everything on a different HD (WD 6.4GB ATA33), NOTHING WORKS.

What is going on??????????????? Is my computer just cursed or something? When I first built my 700 in the summer it worked great no problems whatsoever. I am fairly certain I didn't change anything other than maybe some software or something but I started to get locks in my games and it slowly got worse. What do I do? This is really frustrating. I have tried sysopt.com's forums and haven't been able to find an answer there, I was hoping you guys knew.

Ruahrc