From: Computerpilot on 11/25/2002
That is definitely one of the drawbacks. The ACPI is the advanced power management HAL driver that will allow communication with the OS and your BIOS for power settings (and a few other small things). Usually, installing W2k or WXP on an older system will result in the Standard PC HAL because the BIOS is not supported with the newer windows version.
The Standard PC HAL will also allow more control over the IRQs and allow you to set them via BIOS. The ACPI HAL will not take changes made in the BIOS for IRQs.
Other than that, I am not aware of any major difficulties. I do not think you can run multiple processors with the Standard PC HAL (no muliple processor version). But I am not sure about that and I am sure that does not apply to your case.
If you can live with manually shutting your computer down, then you found a solution that will work. Seems really odd that you would have to change this to make your sound card work but your logic makes sense. Just something to consider... sometimes returning the exact same hardware for another device will fix a problem. The exchanged device may prefer another IRQ and therefore fix your static problem.
Computerpilot