Try different pci slots, set PnP OS support in the bios to YES.

Good luck!

Hi, I tried the one other PCI slot the board has and it does the exact same thing. PnP support is also enabled.

Is there anyway to stop windows from installing new hardware at boot? If i can actually get into windows and install that way the BSOD is recoverable but you get a red X on the SB 16 emulation which at this stage I'm not too fussed about I'm more a windows 9x gamer really.

Change BIOS to PNP OS = NO and try that. If still no good then go in Safe mode you should be able to run Windows in Diagnostic mode by running MSCONFIG. You may have to open a command prompt and type MSCONFIG and choose diagnostic mode, it disables a bunch of stuff iirc. Once you reboot it should be in limited full Windows and from there try to install the real Live drivers if it lets you. Note: I have never dealt with the ATI RADEON 9100 IGP/ATI IXP200 chipset so not sure if this will help.

Thanks for the info Horun. I managed to work around it I went into safe mode, looked for every trace of the drivers it was trying to self install from C:/Windows/inf etc and removed all of them. Then i rebooted and Windows didn't know what the device was anymore so i installed the same, real Creative Live drivers, still got a BSOD at the SB16 emulation driver stage but when actually in windows you can recover from it and it will install the actual card fine. SB 16 Emulation has a red X on it but I don't plan to use this for DOS stuff so it should be able to live with it.

So now I'm happy to report i have a working system with my new Sidewinder joystick working as well. Time to play all those games i never could as a kid because my Packard Bell was barely able to run Duke 3D at the time haha!

Probably Windows is trying to use both VxD and WDM SBLive drivers at same time. Make sure you install only one type of driver for OS install. If you are using DirectX9B and WDM drivers for the rest of the hardware, is better to install WDM SBLive version of the driver and enable ACPI (You will lose SBLive DOS box support doing this). If your hardware is more VxDish, you would like to install only DirectX7.1 and disable ACPI completely (Install windows with Setup.exe /p j). You will get Dos Box SBLive support, but you will lose access to the last titles available for win98se/me

It's funny you mention that actually.. I did disable ACPI 2.0 and ACPI APIC support in the BIOS to get the drivers to install. It was one of the work arounds i made. For me, Windows support is most important as DOS isn't used much and I plan to later build a nice period correct DOS machine.

As for the drivers... I'm not familiar with the VXD drivers and everything. I literally just installed via the .exe and let it do it's thing. I'm currently using Creative official drivers dated 6-6-2008.

Disabling ACPI and Apic helps with VxD drivers.

Anyways, you may like to try the fixes marked in this post: How to get Sound Blaster Emulation in Win9X/ME via live!5.1 with newer-current mobo's (no nmi-ddma)
Since you don't need DOS this would bring you a better experience, and still some Dos Box sound support via windows WDM SBEmul core.
These should install the WDM full version of the drivers... After install you can optionally reenable the ACPI/APIC support and reinstall windows to have better IRQ/memory resource management for modern pci cards (but isn't necessary if you don't want to, as soon as you already have all the cards working).