Slow Win98 startup when desktop appears - Marvel G400 IRQ conflict?

[mpaulsen]

I've been fighting with my Marvel G400 for weeks now and now I'm able to partially use it, but half the time when I boot up into Win98, the system slows to a crawl when the desktop appears. It even took an hour once to fully load! The desktop icons display and refresh at a snail's pace. And the mouse cursor barely responds. At first I thought this had to be an IRQ problem, and it probably is, but I've even gotten this behavior when all devices are on individual IRQ's (no sharing).

I have an IWILL motherboard with the Ali chipset, both with the latest BIOS and AGP drivers. I have an AMD K6-400 and 128 MB RAM. My other PCI devices are:
Adaptec 2940UW
Turtle Beach Montego
3COM Ethernet
I have no ISA cards installed.

This problem seems to kick in again whenever I restart the maching after making changes to the display settings.

As a test, I took out my sound card and everything seemed to be working great. I put the sound card back in and things were good for a short while, but then the problem came back. I've played around a little with the PCI Bus IRQ steering settings (i.e., using BIOS vs. Hardware, disabling some of the IRQ tables, etc.), but it never seems to cure the problem.

Has anyone else experienced this slow loading behavior? Any ideas?

[EchoWars]

As a matter of fact...I have. The very thing you describe. With a Diamond MX300...similar card. I think the problem showed itself after I attempted to load the Aureal reference drivers (www.a3d.com)

You might have a bad sound card driver load. Uninstall 'em and try TB's latest drivers. If that don't work, try the reference drivers.

[mpaulsen]

EchoWars,

Thanks for the tip. I was just about to update my TB drivers.

As a matter of fact, I loaded Unreal the other day and the Aureal engine kept doing weird things when I changed the resolution of the game. I would see the A3D logo pop up then the screen would resize then the logo would reappear, etc.

Mike