I had the same problem with a Gigabyte motherboard, an AMD Athlon XP, and an Nvidia video card. The problem started happening right after I upgraded from a Geforce 3 to a Geforce 4 card. I was just about to return the video card for malfunctioning! My post about this problem is actually elsewhere on this forum.

In any case, unfortunately, my problem just kept continuing and continuing until I upgraded to a Pentium 4 machine with an Asus motherboard. If I were you I'd call up Nvidia or AMD and ask if there are any known conflicts between the two programs and if there is anything they know of that might fix the problem.

thanks
I was thinking about changing to an ATI Radeon card because I thought it might be a graphics card conflict, but I wasn't sure if that would help.

If you have any old graphics cards laying around, try that and see it fixes the problem. I would be afraid to invest so much money in a new Radeon card so soon just to see if *maybe* it fixes your problem, ya know?

A problem these days is that hardware is so fast that minor timing glitches can cause major problems. Windows 98 is especially prone to this. Check your virtual-memory settings -- with 512MB RAM, you don't need it as much. You might Google on these for more.

There are several steps that you can take to eliminate some possible sources of conflict. Start with hardware -- is there a card in the first PCI slot (the one next to the AGP slot)? If so, move it, if you can; it shares an interrupt line with the AGP slot.

While we're at it, dump the AC '97 sound. A sound card -- ANY card -- is better than this type of on-board sound, because AC '97 sound is generated entirely by the CPU; the chipset acts only as the interface. No matter how fast the CPU, this is an anchor, a drag on resources. Would you drive your Corvette with the parking brake on all the time? it's about the same thing!

Now on to the BIOS. There is a setting which determines which slot the computer looks at for the graphics card at boot time. It's titled something like Boot from VGA in slot and the default is usually PCI. Change this to AGP.

Thanks for your help I know my bios settings are right and my virtual ram should be ok I will have to check. I was also thinking about how onboard sound drains your resources.

One major problem with computer is the capacity of a given computer, in that you will find that a software being used is more heavier than the computer, likewise you may not use windows 98 for so many things.