Sound Cards, NIC, and IRQ Sharing

This is a follow on from message http://forums.windrivers.com/showthread.php?t=57641.
I am trying to install my new sound card (Hercules Muse 5.1 DVD) in an old PC (AMD K6-2-500, 384 MB) with XP. My first problem was that my NIC kept dropping out, with a “Network cable unplugged” error message. Everything I've read says to be sure that the sound card has it's own IRQ. No IRQ sharing allowed. Try as I can, moving cards round in slots, and playing with the BIOS, XP always has a load of stuff on the same IRQ as the “Microsoft ACPI-Compliant System”. NIC, audio, video and USB are all on this same IRQ, now IRQ 11. XP ignores the BIOS settings. It was IRQ3, then at one stage in the card juggling they all moved to IRQ11, even though I had released other IRQs by turning off a serial port and the printer port. Unused IRQs at the moment are 2, 3, 5, 7, 9, 10, but nothing I can do gets the system to take these up. For some reason, my NIC is now stable, but the sound quality is still awful (noisy, distorted).
Is the fact that all these devices are sharing the same IRQ as “Microsoft ACPI-Compliant System” still classed as "IRQ sharing", or is this a special case ?
It seems as though I must “reinstall” XP in “Non-ACPI” mode. Do I have any other options ?
Thanks.

Even with the clean installation of XP, you may still have some problems. K6-2 500 board is gonna be old, and the plug and pray BIOS just isn't that hot by current standards. Your system is well under MS's recommended hardware level for XP, so you really might think about a new board, CPU, and memory. Heck, you might even be ahead to buy a complete entry-level system, depending on hard drive capacity, etc. in your current machine. Bit here and bit there upgrades really aren't cost-effective these days.

I've been using XP on this machine for a couple of years. Yes, it is a bit slow, but for what I do, it's OK. An upgrade or new PC would be great, but not possible. Right now, I'd just like some advice on how to get my IRQ's and sound card sorted out.
Thanks.

Besides 'non acpi mode' - which is definately one approach to this problem - You could try opening your bios, & look in the bit about pci slots & Irq's .. something a bit like this:- http://www.hw.by/images/BW7/BIOS-irq.jpg
Then you want to know from your motherboard mannual what slots hand out what potential IRQ's & memory ranges (each slot only offers 'some' of the possible pool, some slots have one choice & others several - also always avoid 'slot1' as generally that shares with any agp card present) & I'd say your best bet is to pick one that allows IRQ 5 (as that's where a soundcard would 'prefer' to be), put your card in that slot, & then set it in bios not to say 'auto' (that's almost invariably the default value) but to allocate IRQ5 to that slot - a reboot should then in theory show that card using IRQ5.

Thanks Confus-ed.
I've had a bit of a play doing this sort of thing, and as I've said XP seems to ride roughshod over any BIOS settings. My manual doesn't have anything about IRQs and PCI slots, but I'll try again anyway !
Won't be for a few days though. I'll let you know how I get on.
Ciao