Ty gave me a soundcard that he happened upon, and it was giving me problems when I tried installing it tonight. These aren’t the same problems as my last soundcard gave me, but I still couldn’t get the thing working. Eventually I found an option in my BIOS to disable the onboard RAID controller, and it fixed whatever problem was going on. The soundcard worked perfectly, and I was happy. I then tried installing the software for my USB speakers (basically it’s just volume control software), but the install program said the speakers needed to be plugged into a USB port for the install to continue. Well, the speakers were plugged into a USB port, so I tried running a file called “USBUPD1.EXE”, not knowing what it was, but hoping that it would somehow force the setup program to recognize that my speakers were plugged in. Well, instead, it fucked my Windows install up–it copied over vmm.vxd and a few other virtual memory manager drivers. When I rebooted, Windows wouldn’t start, and I got an error message saying that several files may be bad. I tried extracting the files from my Windows 98 CD, but I couldn’t find vmm.vxd in any of the .CAB files. Which led me to re-install Windows 98 yet again.
And now, my USB ports appear to have quit working again. When I plug in my camera and turn it on, Windows brings up a message saying that it’s detected a USB device and is locating the software for it, but the message eventually goes away and nothing happens. My camera software won’t even recognize that the camera is plugged in. But hey, at least I’ve got a fucking soundcard that works. God damn it all to hell. The sledgehammer beckons.
Lessons learned: (1) NEVER EVER buy an Abit KG7-RAID motherboard. (2) USBUPD1.EXE = PURE EVIL.