I still cannot get my new sound card working properly.I uninstalled all items related to the onboard sound in device manager and add/remove from control panel.I disabled onboard sound in bios.I installed new sound card and drivers.When I boot I get the box-updating system settings and then I get the pointer and hourglass(froze) and the blue screen.It appears that the settings are being updated and everything freezes up.I have left it run for an hour now and nothing has changed.HELP!

Bootup in safe mode and see if there are additional devices showing. Standard mode will only show one of something when there may be more. It sounds like windows can't find resources to allocate. In the BIOS go to the PnP/PCI config and make sure PNP OS installed is yes. If it was already yes then change "reset configuration data" to enabled. This will free all resources and allow the BIOS and windows to reallocate resources. "reset config data" should reset itself to disabled after one boot, but if not disable it. This may not work is you have older ISA or non PnP cards. Also "resources controlled by" should be "Auto(ESCD)" unless you have hardware that requires assigned resources. While you are in there look at that same screen for Irq assignment by PCI slot. Moving sound card to a slot to use exclusive addresses is desirable but not always possible. In device manager you can see what Irq is being used by what hardware.

I went into the bios and do not see anything related to plug&play.Just in the add/remove windows setup.It is checked.Any other way to get a reset?I went into msinfo32 and found that sci irq for acpi bus,my new sound card,Intel usb host controller and acpi irq holder are all using the same irq.Is this alright? I got it to boot in normal mode by disabling microsoft kernel dls synthesizer and kernel drm descrambler filter.What is this all about?

How did you go to the BIOS?

I kept tapping the f1 key.