Diamond Viper V770

I've got a major problem...I put in a Viper V770, and installed the drivers.....and it didn't modify the registry so as to be recognized and used by DirectX7...the same thing happened with an off-brand generic RIVATNT2 M64 with 32 mb ram....I've tried installing latest drivers, re-updating them, clearing out the system tree and starting over....nothing makes it show up as viable in the DirectX Diagnostic utility, and I can only assume it's failing to write to the registry, but I don't know. The rest of my system is an AMD K62-450 running on an Asus P5A, 64 MB RAM, AOpen FX-3D sound card, Voodoo2 3d accelerator for 3dfx compatibility, Fireport40 SCSI controller running an 8 gig SCSI boot drive and a SCSI CD-ROM, and I also have an 8 gig IDE drive and an IDE CD writer...oh, and a Boca TidalWave modem. All the motherboard drivers and BIOS are updated to the latest possible, and so is everything else....I've been at this for 2 weeks, and I'm lost, here. And that's saying something, since I'm usually too busy GIVING help somewhere to be asking for it...