Are you using the Creative Labs AWE32 drivers or the ones that came with NT? There were some problems with the Creative Labs wave audio driver in its final release for NT. I used to run an AWE32 on NT 4.0 with a dual-processor system and the drivers would cause frequent blue screens. The solution was to revert to the old wave-audio Sound Blaster driver that came with NT 4.0 (the Creative Labs MIDI drivers were fine and could be left installed, if I recall correctly). Your symptoms are different than mine but I'd suggest giving this a try anyway.

I tried a couple of stuff and didn't really find a solution so I removed NT4.0. It was a fun experience though, I tried some games just to see how incompatible it was with games back then. Strangely, although I had never tried the OS before, I got some pretty strong nostalgia from it, as if I had used it before. I love it when that happens 😁.

I used NT 4.0 Workstation extensively between 1996 and 2002, and to this day it's probably my favorite release of Windows. It offered all the essentials like protected memory, multiprocessing, robust filesystems, and stable networking, while still booting within 32MB of RAM. It was the primary OS on Cornell's engineering computers during the late-90's and it powered the graphics workstation that I built to create an 3D animated short film. Have lots of fond memories of it.

Plus there were actually quite a few games that ran fine on NT 4, certainly enough to keep you adequately entertained.