Need a little extra help

[dhin]

Well I feel like I've tried everything, and now I really do need help. I've nearly swapted out evey piece in my PC.

My System used to be:
>Asus P5AB
>AMD K6- 450
>128 Mb RAM
>SoundBlaster Live
>Diamond Viper V770 Ultra
>IOmega ZIP 100
>Fugitzu 24x CD-ROM
>Western Digital 13 Gb HD
>USRobotics 56k Sportster
> and a 3.5" floppy
>300 watt power supply

I've had problems since I built it. It used to lock up every time I used any Graphical Programs (3DStudio Max R3.1 and such.) I swaped the video card for a replacement of the same type when I built it (almost 4 years ago now) and it didn't change, but I did notice that each time I installed a new program it would stop crashing in the previous programs and start crashing only with the newlyu installed program. I thought it was a driver problem so I updated drivers and couldn't fix it, infact the Vidoe divers crashed the whole system and I haven't ever been able to update those succesfully yet (that's still using the origianals.) So as I've been able to I've replaced bit and pieces here and there and now my system is:
>Asus A7V133
>AMD Atholon T-Bird 1.2
>2x 128 Mb RAM
>SoundBlaster Live
>Diamond Viper V770 Ultra
>IOmega ZIP 100
>Creative CDRW 4x4x24
>Samsung 40Gb HD
>Western Digital 13Gb HD
> and a 3.5" floppy
>Billion ISDN Card
>350 watt power supply

The power supply popped last Christmas, the MB and CPU where upgraded last march (and the main board was RMA'ed this may for reasons I'll explain latter.) The new RAM was a Christmas thing and the HD was done in Feb '02. So the system right now is been the wayu it is since around mid May. Around the begining of the year I started getting protection faults with the system and couldn't re-install Windows. The Hardware wouldn't allow the install to copy the needed files sounded to e like either the HD or the IDE channels. I bought a new HD didn't fix the problem, so I RMA the MB and hard it replaced. Problem apeared to be fixed. 4 month Latter the proplem is back. I'm certain it's hardware, but I don't know what as I can check every thing I have in my PC (but the video card) and still get the same problems. Norton Utilities (winDoctor) telled me there is a register problem that it can't fix, Windows install programs crash and I can figure any thing out on what I should do.

I know this is alot of info, but I wanted to be thoroughl. Does any one know any good programs that can check a system for error besides Norton? And does any one have any ideas about what the problem could be? (I've got three different Virus Checks on my system so I've ruled out viruses as my problem.)

Thanks

 

[4Ryan6]

Two things first the SB Live sound card takes two IRQs position it as far from the video card as possible and avoid running anything if possible in PCI slot 2, on some M/Bs PCI Slot 2 shares an IRQ directly with some onboard controllers like RAID. Secondly remove the WD Hardrive completely from the system.