SB Live! driver disables DOS box on WinME

I have a new A7V133 system with the SBLive! 5.1 board, a Geforce2 MX board, LAN card, and PCI modem. I found that I was unable to open the DOS command window under Windows ME; incredibly, it gives me "insufficient memory" error and suggests I close some applications. There is 756 Mbyte of RAM on this sucker and I can run memory-hungry apps like IE and Office no problem.

For various reasons I suspected the sound driver and did a fresh install of ME to get the DOS box back, then carefully installed every driver except Creative's, and the DOS box continued to work. Then, when I installed the Creative driver poof, sound starts working but the DOS box starts giving the error. Disable the SB card in device manager, and suddenly the DOS box is back again. But if I try to renable it, the OS crashes to BSOD and leaves the sound card screeching, nothing short of a power-off reboot cures this.

Help! Has anyone else seen this and/or heard of a fix? I had this same sound card on my old 266MHz PII and it was working fine (with ME and the same drivers installed).