No matter what I tried, I can not get the SB Live! card NOT to load up DOS drivers during boot-up. I tried removing the SB16 emulation driver, but then Win98 sees it when I reboot, and reinstalls the drivers. I tried re-installing the drivers from the cd-rom again with a custom installation selection, I would Un-check the DOS drivers option, but it would still be loaded. The reason why I don't want to load DOS drivers is I am getting a conflict on boot-up saying Sound Blaster 16 emulation driver IRQ is conflicting with PCI IRQ. It is real annoying, please help.

G'day Neil, check your autoexec.bat for any refs to Soundblaster and remove 'em, backup original first just in case.

Have you looked in your Config.sys and Autoexec.bat files?

How do I disable Sound Blaster 16 emulation for DOS?

Go to System Properties in the Control Panel. Click the Device Manager tab, and scroll down to Creative Miscellaneous Devices. Click the plus sign to display the list of devices. Select Creative Sound Blaster Live! SB16 Emulation, and click the Properties button at the bottom of the window. On the General tab, click the check box labeled 'Disable in this hardware profile', then click OK. A red 'X' will appear next to the Creative Sound Blaster Live! SB16 Emulation to indicate that it is disabled. Early driver versions leave odd drivers in the config.sys and autoexec.bat files that are loaded into memory even if emulation is disabled. Make sure you have the latest drivers. Removing the device will only result in it being re-enabled on reboot.

Experience beats research!

You may also try this if you don't like dealing with autoexec.bat and config.sys.
You may want to hit F8 when you see the starting windows 95 message (or something like that), and there's an option that allows you to choose what to load into memory from the listings of config.sys and autoexec.bat
If that didn't do the trick. Choose safe mode or safe command mode would disable all drivers.

first go to start,run,type msconfig.exe put a check in selective startup box on left. now un check autoexec.bat apply , reboot this should take care of it...

Problem is , is that the Windows drivers will automatically put back the reference to sbeinit in your autoexec.bat , I have tried evrything myself and other then doing a selective startup every time , there doesn't appear to be much you can do about it.

go into the folder where sbeinit.com lives and rename the b^&&£r (e.g. sbeinit.cod)
then you just get a 'bad command or file name' message in your boot. any other way, the live! 'fixes' it and puts it back! the live! is a great soundcard but that selfrepairing dos driver is plain dumb.

you must edit the autoexec.bat to skip the following... Add the GOTO SKIPSBL line and the :SKIPSBL line

@ECHO OFF
GOTO SKIPSBL
SET MIDI=SYNTH:1 MAP:E MODE:0
SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 H5 P330 T6
SET CTSYN=C:\WINDOWS
C:\PROGRA~1\CREATIVE\SBLIVE\DOSDRV\SBEINIT.COM
:SKIPSBL
etc...

Another option would be to rename the SBEINIT.Com file. However, though this works, there is yet another, better option: Make SBEInit.Com work. If you can do this, and make your Windows Drivers forcibly set to the same as what SBEInit.Com uses, then you've got a virtual SB16... what's it hurt to have?

In your BIOS, look under "PCI/PNP Configuration" (or something similar... the exact wording can vary), and then you should find a list of IRQ's. Find IRQ5 and DMA1 and set them to "ISA/No ICU" instead of "PCI/PNP/ICU". If you do this, PNP devices (such as the SB Live's native resources) will try to avoid those settings, and so won't conflict with the virtual SB16. After you make this change, go to DOS Mode (not in the GUI) and run SBECFG /A220 /I5 /D1
Then reboot, and make your Windows settings match.