w98 sound card - driver problem (?)

Fresh / clean install w98 SE -- was w95 for 6 years
Soundcard (ISA type) does not work properly. When given any sound file, example a ... beep, tone, ring, it "rapid repeats the tone like a machine gun "... repeating until manually stopped.
ESS Audio card version ES1898F (number on main chip of the sound card)
Windows auto selected driver does not work (always loads 1869 set)..
(model 1898f), 25054drsd989x.exe - ESS Technology, Inc. driver works for the following cards - ESS1869, 1878, 1879, 1898 does not work . Have tried ES1868 through ES1898 on ESS Technology site. This includes deleting modem drivers and remove from Device Manager along with sound card and drivers. Power down, remove physical cards, power up... then power down. Left modem out to allow sound card to locate in preferred IRQ 5 (or where ever it wants to). The above has been done repeatly with the same results. Oh forgot.. changed card locations, and set all "Hardware Accelerations" to low/medium on sound and video card ... including... reloading OS 3 times followed by power down / up and each time defragging the drive.
And here is the final kicker....
The best any of the above works is the "machinegun mode" when getting any "windows OS wave type file "
BUT some drivers will work just perfectly with WMP 6.1 player (.mp3 files) but not other players (example XMplay -- machine gun noise). When this combination occurs, it will also work perfectlly with game DX-BALL 2, but DX-BALL won't load because it says it can't find sound card. Should have documented the drivers before I moved it from w95 to w98 SE.... the card worked perfectly for 6 years.
Any suggestions would be most welcome.

 

That's been my thoughts also. Was hoping for a solution or something I overlooked. Can't understand why the card won't work, but out of ideas. Will take a drive to "cheap cards are us ".
Thanks

 

This probably won't help at all...anyway...
Recently had problems installing an ESS (ISA) card. Would not accept anything else sharing the IRQ. Had to move the motherboard resources that were sharing with it to another IRQ and let it have IRQ 5 to itself. The greedy thing is quite happy now . Might wish to see if anything is sharing with it an can be allocated to another IRQ. Check the card itself for a jumper to change the IRQ.
I wonder whether it may be something interacting between Windows and the card/drivers like DirectX for example. Try running the audio tests in dxdiag. I think DirectX 8.1 is the best version for Win98. If you have gone to DirectX 9, check for more recent updates.

Yes,

was something I was cursing the ESS card with, but didn't want to let it think it had won!

PS: Do you have a good set of motherboard/chipset drivers installed?
PPS: An old/mixed version of the drivers may be causing trouble, try removing the drivers in Safe Mode and running the driver installation there as well.

 

Thank you very much for the suggestions ...
Agree on the man against machine.
Give it a afternoon this weekend.