"I have installed nothing but SoundBlaster products on Via chipsets and if you know Via's peculiarities, it will not be a problem."
Heheh. Riiigggght. I honestly believed the same thing myself at one point but learned otherwise. My Soundblaster Platinum 5.1 WAS is PCI slot 3, I had the 4.32 4-in-1 drivers installed, I had the ASUS 1.004a beta bios. There were no IRQ conflicts. Yes the onboard sound was disabled. When I introduced a Geforce3 to the system was when the problems showed up. Reloading your system every other day is not fun. Only changing to a non-Sblive! sound card fixed the problem.
Admittedly my encounter with the 686B chipset is not what everyone will experience. Some people may work with it and have no troubles, but to say that knowing the peculiarities of the chipset will help you avoid all trouble is pushing it.
I was talking to a friend last night who has written many drivers for Adaptec and Microsoft (mostly Win2K drivers). He told me that it is well known that there are some flaws in the hardware of the 686B chipset, though there are some work arounds through software. He also stated that the most recent release of Windows XP did not include any support for the Via chipsets on the CD because Microsoft didn't want to have to support those problematic chipsets. He also stated that a number of other hardware manufacturers are in the cue for getting booted because their driver support was so flakey.
Food for thought.
Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please. - Mark Twain