ranchdog (if you're there tonight) and the rest, too

I've continued to play with the combination of the ATI PCI video card and my Darla24 sound card with a variety of BIOS settings. Best I've gotten is when I disabled the "PnP Aware OS" setting, reserved IRQ10 to slot 4 (where the Darla24 is) and assigned IRQ10 to the ISA/EISA (to ensure it was held out of the steering pool). Amazingly, the system not only booted & loaded first time out of the gate, but all three cards were properly initialized and ran.

Once.

On all subsequent boots, I was back to the NVRAM check failure. (Finagle's Simplification of Ginzel's Restatement of the Laws of Thermodynamics come to mind: "the perversity of the universe tends to maximize".)

Any other ideas?

PS - I noticed the DVD response is pretty choppy. You might talk me into a new AGP card yet...but it won't be a fancy one.

Pardon me now while I finish watching the Yankees spank the Mariners. (Finagle again...I'm a Seattle native.)

Config (such as it is):
MSI 6380A (KT266A)
T-bird 1.4G
256k Crucial DDR
Cheap D-link 10/100 NIC
Ancient Rage Pro PCI Combo Card