From what I have read and learned, I believe it is an incompatibility between two hardware devices, but which two??? All PCI devices are assisgned IRQ 9 and cannot be changed under Win2K.

Does anyone have any knowledge how to determine this or can you give me some steps I might take to determine if conflicts DO exist when the device manager indicates NO conflicts exist???

ive tried most things out but i was curious as to what computerpilot has written invlovin the ACPI HAL...how would i go about and chging this ?

The addition of the Network card is what killed you. That was the straw that broke the camels back. Move it to a PCI slot far away from where it is now. This will probably fix your whole problem.

I would not try another video card. They will all most likely have similar IRQ addresses assigned.

You do NOT have to reinstall Windows 2k. You can change to the Standard PC HAL driver in the Device Manager, then reboot. You want to select the first listing in the Device Manager and click the plus icon. You will see the ACPI listing. Double-click it and choose to update driver. Manually select the STandard PC driver (HAL). Restart computer. I would only do this as a last resort.

Your post was extremely valuable. Thanks. I had a suspicion that the video card was involved in the conflict. I will take your advice and move the PCI cards around.

I did add a network card, but this is the only card not shipped with the original PC.

However, could it be posible that the OEM video card shipped with the PC is the main culprit? If I was to change the video card to a different OEM product, could this solve the problem even if it continues to share IRQ 9 with the LAN card? (I don't want to start purchasing hardware if the problem is deeper).

Also, If you don't mind responding, If I do have to take the route of changing the ACPI setting to standard, it seems that I may have to reinstall win2K (MS warns against doing this). In your knowledge, are there any IRQ settings that I should steer clear of?

thanks again

I would try moving devices around to different PCI slots in your computer. The farther from the orginial position, the better. This will force the HAL to reassign IRQ addresses. Find the most used and most robust device that shares IRQ with the Video card and get that device to change IRQ addresses (by moving it to a new PCI slot).

For some reason, Windows 2k and XP have now started assigning IRQ addresses without the ability to change them. I really think that Microsoft should release this with their professional operating systems so that administrators can have the ability to fix more of these hardware conflicts. Windows XP has gotten worse... Windows 2k is usually not that bad with this issue.

Another method to change assigned IRQ addresses is to change the ACPI HAL to 'Standard'. This will completely remove all advanced power management capabilities of the computer. Therefore, you computer will not shut down automatically (you will have to hit the power button to shut down) as well as some other power management features will be lost. However, you will regain the ability to manually set IRQ addresses for your hardware devices. If you want to know how to do this, please post back.

Hope this helps.