Yep, those, amongst others, are some of the sites I have been using.
My aggravation/problem is I do not have the spare time or want to have to go back to doing a months worth of debugging, downloading, fixing in the time when I am not at work. (I do have another life (really!!))
I am willing to spend the money to get a system which is truly plug and play SCSI/Firewire/USB. (which is what the manufacturers were promising with P & P/USB/Firewire in the first place)!
The problem seems to be that the motherboards expect cards to be ACPI compliant, i.e. they will share IRQs with up to 4-5 on a single IRQ. When they boot just have a look at how they load. But, most old cards are not compliant. Certainly not the SB cards (DOS/SB16 backward compatible)and not my network card or SCSI card. (I even bought a USB network adaptor but it obviously uses the same basic components internally because as soon as it is recognised - bang BSD with a memory error and reboot.)
I went looking for an ACPI compliant network card and found a 3COM card (3c model, the 3b isn't) but it costs £80+. I cannot find any sound card that claims compliance or any details of compliant firewire/SCSI cards. I found an Adaptec joint SCSI/firecard to try and get around the problem, but that costs £450!!
The only sure answer seems to be to totally disable the motherboard plug and play and set the everything by hand. But, because they are P & P, the manuals for most of my cards/devices do not give any IRQ/DMA or memory details at all.
[This message has been edited by ORAC (edited 05 November 2000).]