As if there weren't enough reasons to hate IRQ/DMA/PORT stuff...

I am trying to get all my cards to play nice with each other but they simply refuse to stay the way I set them.

I clear my BIOS by removing the battery and putting it back in place. Then I go to the Peripherals section in my BIOS and disable everything I don't absolutely need. Then I format my hard drive. Then I install DOS. Then the first thing I do is install sound drivers in DOS. It works. My cards are all set up not to use the same resources. At this point, I put Win95 on and that's when everything goes to hell. Whatever Win95 does to manage I/O addresses, it's putting something else at 220 so that my sound card doesn't work anymore. What's worse, when I go back to DOS, even though it worked before, it's broken now and requires a BIOS reset. Somehow the ESCD/BIOS is saving the mistakes that Windows is making and perpetuating it in a way that I cannot alter. I don't even know what's being put there to block my sound card but there's something there.

Since I've wasted hundreds of hours on this machine, either due to anomalous CPU scores or resource problems, I'd be immensely appreciative if someone could help me skip to the end and get this thing to behave properly. Is there a way to brute force resources where you want them? Why is the computer ignoring the jumpers on my ISA cards? I clearly set the sound card to use 220H so why is it putting something else there? None of my other cards' jumpers conflict with that port. The stupid BIOS doesn't have any way to dictate that a card or resource should be fixed. It just has this useless PNP or legacy ISA setting for each IRQ/DMA channel which does nothing once it's broken. I don't even really know what to ask for in terms of help so maybe someone who has a lot of experience screwing around with old socket 5/7 boards can just tell me what they do to prevent this, when they have a lot of isa/pci cards in the same system. Sorry, I'm just really tired an pissed off at having beaten on this thing for so many weeks, going on months now with almost no progress to show for it and I don't like whining online every time I hit a wall so consider this my consolidated temper tantrum for the month.