Ed,

First of all thanks for the information.

> I've seen this caused by background processes firing off that are not ME
> compatible, or with disk drives that had the documented (and fixed) IDE drive
> bug wrt SCANDISK.

I have 2 HD, the original 6 Gb that came with the computer and I'd added a 14 Gb IBM disk. So may be one of them is causing the problem, i'll search the fixed you mention. As for background processes I (think) that I'd disabled everithing for testing but the problem persisted.

>It's possible; I haven't had problems with my hardware, which is pretty
>varied, but it's definitely a possibility - it took a bit to get updated
>versions of DirectCD for my CD-RW drive, although version 3.01 did run even
>though it bitched. USB device support is definitely better, which was an
>active concern for me both here at home and for several clients.

Just pay a visit to the creative support newsgroup and you'll see hundreds of creative labs webcam go complaining about the lack of drivers for ME.

>I'd suspect that it didn't like sharing interrupts; moving it to a different
>slot or changing the PCI IRQ vector registers might fix the problem, but I
>don't know what card is involved.

I'll swap my three (Diamond Monster, Network adapter and the pci to parallelcard) pci cards tomorrow to see wat happens.

>The added Windows Components probably are doing this; if these are DOS-based
games, I'd read the Optimizing and MS-DOS Program entry in the Help file, and
>the Resource Kit docs; the underpinnings of ME are not really DOS, and many
>settings that used to be made in AUTOEXEC.BAT or CONFIG.SYS have moved into
>INI files or the registry, and have to be set either using .REG files or via
>MSCONFIG.

Both games are windows games, and one of them is relatively new (1999)

>I've found that as an AD client, a 256MB PIII-500 is very happy and stable
>compared to the same system under Win98SE. The port from SE went very
>smoothly, and this box didn't see as massive an improvement in system boot
>speed as newer HP boxes I've put up for clients with ME; ME running on
>a current motherboard starts up fast.

Well, I read some magazine article that praised the improvements over W98 in stability, and boot speed and that decided me to make the upgrade. And I agree that the boot speed is very quick, the problems come after :)

>My ME box is not exactly a spring chicken, and it's a relatively complex >environment - Asus P2B-S motherboard, 256MB RAM, 2 SCSI LVD disk drives, IDE >DVD with decoder, IDE CD-RW, DDS tape drive, ATI VGA Wonder, NIC, 2 printers
>(1 parallel, 1 USB), SB Live!, and my MS Voice phone system on a Component
>Object Model port makes sharing IRQs a necessity, and it works with relatively
>few interventions (upgraded CD-RW software and refreshed the Server's AD info
>for it) and it has run without demanding reboots too often. It definitely has
>trouble with a few of the games I had, but they aren't a major issue for me.

I am thinking of buying a new machine, and I guess the operating system will be Windows 2000, I heard very good things about it (just like ME:) I still miss OS/2 Warp, once You'd found the proper drivers (not easy, of course) everything ran smoothly for very long periods. (actually I hardly remember OS/2 not working, if a program didn't respond it was very easy to kill it)


Ed, thanks again for your time
Hugo