I'm in a (very) similar situation, hence not starting a new thread as the wisdom appears here. Happy to post as new if y'all reckon.

Win98SE box used for driving equipment via mobo LPT(ECP) post, that port has died. OK, spare PCI slot, slap in a PCI LPT(ECP) card. Win98 detects new hardware, but I didn't have the driver CD at hand so I selected "ignore". Now that I have the driver at hand, Win98 has taken that to heart and no longer detects the card, and "add new hardware" doesn't find any new Plug&Pray hardware. Attempting to add it manually falls over as nothing in the list aligns with it (Yumcha cheapie).

How do I get Win98 to un-forget a hardware item it prevously detected?

Can't you see it, disabled in device manager?

If yes, just delete and reboot.

No it's not there. Have tried remove/refit but it isn't detected on a reboot.

Kludge : put it in another slot and reboot

There's no spares so I'd have to pull another out (or swap them). May have to give that a whirl.

Curse the card designers who make some "left-handed" and others "right-handed" so they don't always play nice together. I have some mobos with unusable slots because of that.

There's always add new hardware > "I want to choose" >I have the driver disc

There was nothing in the list that would correspond to the card.

Tried another slot (had to pull an ISA card to be able to use the lowest PCI slot) and yes Win98 found it. Automagically assigned a 2013 vintage driver which did an incomplete resource assignment. Selected update driver, it swept through the supplied driver CD and rejected them all. So now to try and get it resourced.

I usually use "device proprieties" => Disable in current hardware profile.

Alternative is disabling bridge device is connect to (PCI, PCIe, etc).

? I'm not trying to disable it.

It shows in Device Manager as "working properly", but doesn't show complete resources - no DMA channel, no primary port address (only the secondary that's normal for ECP ports). Without the primary port address I am unable to successfully edit the operating code to use the card/port.