Hi All, I've been a longtime lurker of this site and have solved countless issues thanks to threads here! I've finally found one that I couldn't solve myself. I'm working on a Win98 Pentium 3 build currently with Voodoo 3 which I repaired with a simple firmware flash. Now I'm onto the audio side of things and I'm having a hell of a time. I have tried three different Sound Blaster cards in this system: 2x Sound Blaster Live! PCI (CT4830 and CT4670), as well as a Sound Blaster 16(cT5801). The SB lives were my first choice, but I had countless issues getting drivers to even install. Tried every driver I could find online that was reported to work with these cards. Most resulted in system crashes/hangs, memory parity errors, or strange graphical garbage+crashes. Boot to safe mode, uninstall, repeat with the next driver. Ad infinitum. When I finally found a driver that appeared to work in device manager, I still got no sound from either card, the system became unstable, and games/applications didn't recognize either Live! at all. I set them both aside and decided to go with an older Sound Blaster 16 just today. The driver installation went much smoother, but I still experienced a couple of weird lockups on windows boot. The absolute best scenario I experienced (with the SB16) was this: The driver installed fine, music would play successfully in Creative Playcenter 2, but i heard nothing but extremely loud screeching and "Robot noises" through my speaker. Now I've been through 3 cards and numerous system crashes and I'm about fed up. As a last ditch effort I inspected all three cards and noticed that both the Live! cards have what appear to be several bulging capacitors. They are all unbranded electrolytics. The SB16 only has a handful of aluminum caps on it which all appear OK to my eye. no wonder that i had the most success with this card. My question is this: Is it worth trying to replace the capacitors on these cards and trying again? I am comfortable replacing caps and have plenty of soldering experience, but I don't want to waste any more time on this if the cards are just dead. Has anyone successfully repaired a sound card by recapping it? I realize these cards are relatively cheap on ebay but I fear that I'll have the same issue down the line and have to do a recap anyways. Maybe I am overlooking some other simple issue, but I feel like I've tried everything at this point. Is It possible that bad caps are causing the system crashes? Google has not been most helpful in this regard, hopefully someone here has some insight!!!