Windows xp corrupting while installing soundcard

Everytime I try and install my soundblaster live 5.1 into my computer it ends up by screwing over the whole OS. First I get windows up and runnung fine with no sound card installed, everything works fine. I have a soyo dragon plus mother board so I can use the onboard sound with no problems. When I want to switch over to the soundblaster, I first disable the onboard sound in the bios install the SBL and start it up. The SBL makes my computer lock right after xp detects it and installs the drivers. So ill reboot and in the device manager it has little yellow exclamation points bu the video card. It says some device on my radeon card isnt installed or some bs like that. So I click reinstall drivers which xp does. Now everything is fine, no exclamation pionts. But windows still locks up. I got ****ed and decided to take the SBL out of my computer. When irestarted windows wthout the SBL it said

missing or corrupt c:\windows\system32\config\system file

Windows it totally screwed over now and I cant fix it, so I reformatted and reinstalled everything. (i have done this twice already. Im afraid to put the card back in again.

Could I have a broken sound card here, or maybe bad ram? Or is windows just having some kind of conflict between these devices. I did have both of these devices(SBL and radeon VIVO) installed for some time and this problem just happened a few weeks ago. Could xp not like my video card drivers when the SBL is installed. HELP !!!!

Hardware

Soyo dragon plus
xp2100
micron pc2100
ati radeon vivo
scsi 15k


Software
Windows xp pro

Are you overclocked? Have you tried the card in a different PCI slot?

As for the exclamation point by your Radeon, that's the Rage Theater I'd bet. It's qwerky. You need to install a 2nd driver pack to go along w/ the catalyst drivers for cards w/ VIVO.

yea I tried differnt pci slots and I am not overclocked. I tried 2 pci slots but dont want to try anymore because i dont want to reinstall again. I guess ill just live without the SBL.

same exact thing happened when i built my p4 rig with my old yamaha sound card, it would lock up instantly, so i ripped out and used it as a good excuse to buy a SBL 5.1 and its worked fine since..i know that doesnt help much but your not alone

Do you have the right drivers. The service pack1 doe xp has a history of causeing crashes

I had the same problem for 3 months. I had times when It didnt even detect it, the problem was it wasnt seated correctly in the pci slot. make sure its seated correctly

Well i just went out and bought a philips sound card. It was acting wierd at first and crashing. Then my computer went into an endless boot loop. Windows would not load. I put back all default settings in the bios, and ran Windows XP reapir. It fixed the booting problem, then I unistalled my ATI multimedia center. Then installed the sound card It was still crasing when i was trying to install the sound card drivers. It would recognize the sound card, but not the PCI device ?? Well anyways i just clicking on stuff in the device manager and got it working. Windows XP is a pain in my ***. It appeared to be running fine after that, but only time will tell for sure.