I have a DFI-ITOX motherboard based on the Intel Q35 chipset (ICH9, socket 775) that has quite a few legacy options such as serial, parallel, 2 PCI ports, and IDE port, and a floppy port, so that makes this kind of ideal for a Windows 98 build. However, I haven't had much luck in a native DOS environment with PCI sound cards, and I've tried quite a few different ones I have on-hand, and so far the one I've had the most luck with, at least in native DOS, is the S3 Sonic Vibes card.

However, it is giving me fits in Windows. I've tried it in 95, 98, and ME. In ME, it just plain gives up throwing me a Windows Protection error upon boot when initializing the vxd file for the S3. I am able to get it fully working properly in 95 and 98, but what happens in both instances here is that upon booting the system, when it reaches the desktop background but before the desktop icons and start bar are loaded, it hangs and will sit there for a good 4 or 5 minutes before EVENTUALLY loading the desktop and the sound working properly.

However, during the hang, It does respond to a ctrl-alt-del and says MSGSRV32 is not responding. My 2 options here are to end the process or press cancel. If I end the process, it go back to hanging. However, if I simply press the cancel button, it proceeds to immediately load, regardless of how much time it had been hanging initially. So if I'm there to directly interact with it, I can get it to boot up pretty quick. But this is not ideal.

Anybody have any similar experiences with this card and/or any suggestions? I had even considered trying to get a script to run to automate that process of bring up the ctrl-alt-del box and pressing cancel, but I can't get a script file to run at this part of the boot process. Running from autoexec.bat it too early and it hasn't yet reached the point where it will run stuff from my startup folder.

Drivers are kind of hard to find and I've tried 2 different similarly numbered versions, both with the same result.