I hate to bring this topic up once again as I can tell by the numerous posts that it has been beatin to death, but I still have the problem.
My problem of course is Windows 98 Second Edition locking up with the SoundBlaster Live! X-Gamer card installed on my ABIT Motherboard. I'll give you guys my comp specs and then explain what I've tried to do to fix my problem. Hopefully someone out there can help me out.

SPECS:

Abit KT7A-Raid Motherboard
AMD ThunderBird 1.2 GHZ (266FSB)
512 MEGS of Kingston Value Ram (CAS 3)
AGP - Leadtek Winfast Geforce 2 GTS PRO 64 MEG Video Card
PCI 1 - Empty
PCI 2 - Empty
PCI 3 - Empty
PCI 4 - 3-COM OEM Modem
PCI 5 - SoundBlaster Live! X-Gamer (NOT 5.1 version)
IDE 1 - Western Digital 40 GIG IDE Hard Drive (ATA100) Primary
Western Digital 20 GIG IDE Hard Drive (ATA100) Slave
IDE 2 - Creative 12X DVD Drive
Memorex CDRW

300 Watt Power Supply

What I've done to try to solve the lock ups:

- Loaded recent VIA 4 in 1 Drivers (4.31 FINAL) after a fresh Windows install
- Flashed my Motherboard BIOS to latest version (5/11)
- Loaded the 686B Bug Fix from VIA
- Loaded most recent Live drivers (Tried both installing JUST the drivers and installing Liveware 3.0... with and without DOS drivers)
- Disabled SB16 Emulation using the techniques at KT7 FAQ
- Loaded most recent version of my video card drivers (both NVIDIA refrence & Leadtek's verions)
- Tried disabling any unnecessary startup program with MSCONFIG
- I've tried removing both CD-ROM drives from the system
- I've tried just having the sound card and the video card installed
- Tried moving the sound card to various PCI slots
- Tried VARIOUS BIOS settings including (but not limited to):
- Setting IRQ 5 to Legacy ISA
- Changing the AGP drive strength to EA (as Joker1 suggested on a previous post)
- Loaded "Fail Safe Settings" and "Optimal Settings"
- Tried setting the memory hole to 15-16MB
- Disabled almost everything that can be disabled with the system still able to operate.

And I've done many more things in the BIOS and in Windows that I can't recall at the moment. But I've followed many suggestions on previous forums and the KT7 FAQ at Viahardware.com

One thing of interest. Joker1 said his system was stable @ 800 MHZ. I've noticed that the lower I set my clock settings the longer it takes for my system to crash with the sound card installed. Currently with a clock rate @ 800 MHZ & my system seems to be completly stable with the SBLive!. Mind you my system is COMPLETLY stable @ 1.2GHZ with all the BIOS performance tweaks but once that sound card is installed and the clock rate is raised Windows is guaranteed to crash.

Well I'd appreciate any suggestions and any info you can point me to. Please read what I've attempted to do before you make suggestions =]

Thanks

-Lane