Phil,
Modem is installed and working fine (it's in it's own category).
I'm not too sure if the sound card has an IDE connector to it. It's a laptop (Gateway Solo 9100). The CD-ROM drive - not too sure on that either, it's one of those combo drives.
I got my 98 Boot Floppy from bootdisk.com, so maybe it didn't load something right. Before I flashed the BIOS with a new processor (from my other posts), I did have 98 on here originally to see if the thing even worked. At the time it booted OK from CD, but now booting from CD is very iffy (sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't). I tried another CD-ROM drive, makes no difference. Maybe it's a separate issue, but at least I have 2 OS's on there now for good (I'm going for 98 since I have old data on SuperDisks I'd like to get), XP, and eventually, Ubuntu (all on their own partition).
Anyway, when I had 98 on here the first time, I didn't have any unknown devices, but my sound card was acting strange. I mean I could play CD's, the startup sound went through, but that 98 asterisk/exclamation sound - never got it. I would get an error that my sound card was in use by another program (to which no program was even open!). But now that sound card works, no problems there.
Let me know if you need to check anything else. I appreciate your help thus far.
VV5