have you tried the actual mx300 drivers rather than generic aureal drivers? there might be little difference but i thought i saw somewhere that the mx300 didn't have quite the same functionality as aureal's own brand cards.

also i seem to recall it was a pain to get these installed first time round, plus they can be hard to uninstall properly [i still have the aureal control panel icon in xp, nothing seems to shift it]. when i reinstalled 98 everythng went smoothly. so there maybe something that doesn't work quite right with one of the sets of drivers and this card - i too had tried a few driver downloads.

fwiw i use v5 + mx300 + a7m266 + athlon xp2000 + 98 first ed

Yep, I had same problem. And the problem for me was the original MX300 driver. So I first went to Safe mode and remove the original drivers. Clean the registries with NU and CCLeaner for windows 98. And i found good drivers (Vortex 2) on this site - http://members.optusnet.com.au/kirben/drivers.html - I remember that i tested few of them before i get good one.

I followed that link but it just took me to a russian site and it wanted an ftp password

This page?
http://release.narod.ru/2048.htm#w9x

you must try all links some of the links are dead
if the link is dead and you want the specific file, just copy the file name and paste it into the Google search, it will find you other places.

http://www.vogonsdrivers.com/index.php?catid=3

Try the official MX300 drivers on the Vogons Drivers site.

Dank0 I love your avatar 😁. I think you might find robertmo's avatar familiar as well 😜.

Yep, HOD was really fun to play 😀

If you use the Aureal reference drivers, use 2041. Later drivers have game breaking problems.
ftp://ftp.nchu.edu.tw/Hardware/multimedia/Aureal/

BTW, some games that use A3D may cause BSODs or kernel crashes. Vortex drivers are pretty buggy no matter the version.

What games are known to crash or BSOD with 2048 and the MX300 (or any other Vortex 2)? That was the latest set I was able to obtain and had them uploaded on the Vogons driver page. So far I have had ZERO issues with them on my Voodoo 5 box. I have ran maybe 20 games or so on it so far with those drivers with no issues.

2048 has reversed stereo for some sounds in Elite Force. Its EAX reverb emulation is also unfinished and basically useless because it sounds awful.

2041 is on the above FTP.

For some BSODs and kernel errors try SiN and Elite Force. Particularly if you disable and enable the A3D support a few times. Or maybe quit and reload the games. a3dapi eventually blows up. Driver version didn't seem to matter.

Directsound and Directsound3D don't kill Windows. It's an A3D thing.