Possibly the PnP tools of the ESS card are incompatible with a Creative card in the same system. You might want to give initialization using unisound a try and instead.

I never had any luck getting an ESS card working with my CT-1920 (Goldfinch) and it was the same deal, the PC would freeze. I never worked it out but it did find that the Goldfinch worked fine with Crystal based cards for what its worth, and they also have a working wavetable header.

I've used an ESS 1868F together with an AWE64 before, both with their stock drivers, and had no problems.

But I think I had to set "PNP OS Installed" to Yes in the BIOS. Check if you have a similar setting on your system.

You might also need to configure the EMU8K to a different set of port addresses than 620/A20/E20. Traditionally on the ISA bus, cards are allowed to ignore the top 6 bits of the I/O address to be able to decode the I/O address with a single 74-series comparator/decoder chip. The default addresses of the EMU8K on the AWE32 are intentionally chosen to "collide" with 220 when the top bits are ignored, so an AWE32 card does not use a bigger amount of 10-bit I/O space than the SB16 did.

Assuming the crystal card only looks at the low 10 bits and is configured to 220, it will conflict with 620/A20/E20

PNP Bios setting and playing with addresses did nothing. However Unisound fixed the issue. In theory I now should be able to play ESFM with AWE sound, not that anything uses that combo.