system freeze when sound is played

[pusher]

Hi
I have constructed a system of quite old components
Intel BX440se motherboard
s3 virge vga
Intel PIII slot 1 cpu
Its just for the kids to use the internet on.
Its been running solidly on windows98se since I built it.
I recently put a soundcard in, a cheap PCI cmi8738 card.
It installed fine, using the setup.exe from the drivers cd.
However, when I go to sounds in the control panel and play a sound, the system freezes almost instantly. It does this everytime.
There is minimal software installed, just windows, messenger, zonealarm, and some utilities that came with the soundcard

What I have tried
3 different soundcards.
Using different pci slots for the soundcard.
Different vga card, in different slots.
Different memory sticks.

The same problem happens with all combinations of hardware.

Has anyone any suggestions?

Thanks in advance.

Pusher

[ski]

If the MB has a built-in sound adapter, then go into BIOS and disable it, restart in Safe mode, uninstall all sound card software from Control Panel/Add/Remove Programs, right click on My Computer, click Properties, click Device Manager, remove all sound cards listed, restart the computer, let Windows recognize the PCI sound card, and reinstall its drivers.

If there's no onboard sound adapter or if the above does not work, then open Device Manager, and see if there are any problems with the sound card(red circle with an X, yellow circle with a !, etc.).
If so, then double click on the sound card, and post what it says under 'Device Status'.
If there are no problems showing in Dev. Mgr., then double click 'Computer' at the top of the Dev. Mgr. list, and see if the sound card is sharing its IRQ with another device.