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The USB2/Firewire is a good candidate for having been your culprit. I ran into this with a maxed out Athlon recently when trying to add a Firewire card. It just wouldn't work, as it was unhappy sharing any IRQ and there were no more dedicated ones available (and Krystal was hard-mapped to an IRQ in the BIOS).
Result was that Medit wasn't working right, and a whole lot else wasn't either. So I ripped it out, though did not need to reinstall anything.
I'm going to try it again when I get more time and defeat one of the machine's serial ports in BIOS and then hard assign that IRQ to the slot for the Firewire board. Or maybe defeat the LPT port and map that IRQ to the Firewire card, as my audio systems mostly don't have printers on them.
By the way, PC Mag proved that though the spec for Firewire is slightly slower than for USB 2, Firewire transfers large files faster.
I was able to verify that using an outboard box that has both USB2 and Firewire interfaces and an Asus P4PE Pent 4 machine which also has both on the m/board. I took a typical mix of MTU files (sev large and a few smaller SFs, a medium sized SF2 of about 600Mb, etc) and tryied both ways. I had an outboard Maxtor 40 gig drive in the box. I transferred same set of files to 2 diff logical drives in the Pent 4, one USB2 and one Firewire. Firewire seemed to get it done about 20% faster in my test.
I also deliberately fragmented 2 diff logical drives created on the outboard and then attempted to defrag them using just the Win98SE defrag (FAT 32), doing one drive each way after re-boot of course. I used same file sets, and deleted some files so the drives would be fragmented. Result was again that Firewire was about 15% faster than USB2 in defragging under these conditions.
If looking at these outboard boxes, the ones to get seem to have the Oxford chipset - all the reviews seem to say that one offers the best USB 2 and Firewire implementation. The boxes sell under several brands, but mostly all look the same so prob all come from same place. They run about $65 to $75 at several Internet sources. Also for USB 2, be sure to use a USB2 rated cable. Many are not.
One more tip- before I install anything new in machines I need to rely on, I run (and verify) a C drive backup. This is true for ANY patch or program and ANY new hardware! I use BackupMyPC (formerly Backup Exec) to do that, though I guess you could use newer Roxio stuff since that now will verify. I keep the boot drives small on Win98SE machines-- and I almost never allow them to go on the Internet -- I d/l any patches to other machines, copy to CD, and install that way. Only exception to that is a very few Win patches that you can't-- but since most are browser and Internet patches, I don't use those in the audio machines. Keeps Win from being a bigger resource hog in my view. Most of my audio systems have been online maybe an hour tops in their entire lives, and a couple don't even have modems. (I'll hook up an external one to a serial port if absolutely necessary).
With Backup My PC, you can create 2 emergency floppies, and if the drive is small, you can fit the C drive's contents on a CDRW. So when problems arise, I simply wipe and re-format the C drive using the emerg. floppies, then restore the whole known-good configuration from the CDRW.
This has saved my tail numerous times.
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