A7A266 setup woes : Solved!

Solved stability and performance issues below by not installing any ALI AGP driver(tried all builds). Dont give WinME a sniff of them and all will be rosey.

New system up and running(Components listed below)but as soon as its put under any real load stutters,hangs and crashes galore! Also ME's system device list sometimes reports the secondary IDE controller as missing and suggests I load new drivers while being happy enough with the same driver for the primary. Tried a few tests,fixes I found on these boards - Running minimal comonents with the case open and house fan assisting, still unstable at 44C. Turning FSB to 100 and running the athlon at 1050Mz, no change. Swapping out the DDram for SDram. Playing around with the jumper at the end of the AGP that I read here sets ram voltage, no more stability gained. However when I dropped in a friends GF2MX no more hangs or crashes just poor performance and stuttering in 3D games.Then I tried an old 8meg Millenium 2 and windows slowed to a crawl. I suspect a faulty board but I am not that experienced at putting these things together and cant shake the feeling I've overlooked something obvious. So 4x APG card = stablity gain over my 2x, removal of CDRW = minimal gain. I'm at a loss.
Athlon 1.4Gz 266FSB
Asus A7A266 rev 1.04 bios flashed to 1006
256Mb DDram from Crucial
8.6GB IBM HD
32meg TNT2 m64 running lastest Nvida reference driver
Yammaha 4x4x16 CDRW
Mitsumi floppy
Running Windows ME
300W Power Supply

<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by Unbroken on 10/02/01 10:49 AM.</EM></FONT></P>

these driver are very important for a7a owner i own one my self install the intergrated driver it fixes all problems with thw agp and whole lota other things <A HREF="http://www.ali.com.tw/eng/support/drivers/north_agp_driver.htm" target="_new">http://www.ali.com.tw/eng/support/drivers/north_agp_driver.htm</A>
i hope u reinstalled your OS after u built your new system and get a new video card u should be able to get mx400 64meg for about 80 bucks at newegg.com. the driver should fix all performance issues, but i still think that old ass card is whats screwing u and u said it your self with your friend mx card only performance issues were a problem which the intergrated driver fixes driver fixes.

I should have stated the 1.74 AGP driver was installed first thing. Switch 5 is set to off on my MB as the manual contradicts itself in the text and diagram. I got the setting from the tables on the MB itself. Are you sure your system is running with switch 5 set to on?

I do think there is a prob with the IDE controller but I cant seem to find an UDMA IDE driver for this MB, only a cache and utility thingy seems on offer. Anyone know which is needed and where to get it?