I grit my teeth, crossed my fingers and proceeded to flash my BIOS today. It all rebooted OK, what a relief.My sound is imbedded onto my motherboard, which has always worked OK (although I have heard that sound cards are better?). Anyway, on reboot the system found a multi-media controller to install (was already installed before- I'm not sure if the process of flashing and then resetting BIOS changed the IRQ, and that looks like another device to XP?).I've installed the driver, but as a part of that had to add permissions to the registry (I had to do this on original install too for the sound card, took me a week to find that little gem- if anyone wants to know more I'll post here).In the process of navigating down the keys in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE > SYSTEM > CurrentControlSet > ENUM > PCI, I note dual entries for the multi-media controller. I'm not sure if that's right, or if one of the entries is now for a controller that disappeared when the IRQ was changed after flashing. If I do have extraneous entries in this part of the registry, is this going to slow the system down? I recall from years ago that unfound devices caused the IRQ sequence to enter a time-out, which basically paused the CPU for that time. Any info much appreciated- the computer seems to be running OK, although it does appear to be a bit slower by my benchmarks I took before the entire flash process begun. Thanks, I hope some of this makes sense :),Bruce.

Bruce, I cannot offer a sound explanation of why your system would have reinstalled your soundchip device after flashing the BIOS, unless possibly your BIOS did not have plug and play activated and when you flashed the BIOS it went to a default of plug and play enabled. This might release the IRQ's for windows to now handle and XP deciding to rearrage things, but that is just a guess. I'm pretty new to XP myself and am still learning what is the same and what is different from Win98SE.I do remember getting multiple instances of plug and play monitors every now and then when I would do something with my video card. My usualy solution with Win98 was to boot into safe mode and when you went into the device manager, you would be able to see all the instances of a duplicated device. I would then remove all instances, reboot the computer and let it find the hardware again and then there would be just one instance in device manager. However, I'm not sure if there is a safe mode in WinXP and if so, if it works the same way. But maybe that will give you some ideas. I will go into the registry when I have to, but if I can find some other way to accomplish things, I stay out of the registry.

Thanks Scott,I also recall going into Safe Mode in Win98 and being able to see any hardware for which there was more than one instance. I tried this with XP (push F8 on re-boot), but no sign of any multiple instances there (in View, there's an option "show hidden devices", but that didn't show anything either).One good thing about XP, is that you can create a restore point before tweaking the registry, then go back to that point later if necessary- but if you can't even boot into XP, I'm not sure what good that does, other than if Safe Mode is available I guess.Thanks again for your input,Bruce.

I'm using Windows 2000, and flashed the BIOS of a new motherboard over the weekend. When rebooting back into Windows after the flash, it reloaded all kinds of mobo hardware drivers. First time I've ever seen that. As long as there are not dual entries in Device Manager, I wouldn't worry about what you see in the registry.-Basil

Thanks Basil- good to hear from you.Bruce.