Windows XP do not work the same way Win98 used to do when it came to assinging IRQs to PCI devices. A brief explanation can be found in
A general description of IRQ sharing in Windows XP, for where I'm citing:
Quote:
Windows XP cannot rebalance resources in the same way that Microsoft Windows 98 does. After PCI resources are set, they generally cannot be changed. If you change to an incorrect IRQ setting or I/O range for the bus that a device is on, Windows XP cannot compensate by rebalancing the resource that was assigned to that bus.
[...]
The Plug and Play operating system settings in the computer BIOS do not generally affect how Windows XP handles the hardware. However, Microsoft recommends that you set the Plug and Play operating system setting to No or Disabled in the computer BIOS.
[...]
Manually assigning IRQs to PCI slots in the system BIOS as a troubleshooting method may work on some non-ACPI systems that use a standard PC hardware abstraction layer (HAL), but these settings are ignored by Plug and Play in Windows if ACPI support is enabled. If you must manually assign IRQ addresses through the BIOS to a device on an ACPI motherboard, you must reinstall Windows to force the installation to use a Standard PC HAL.
|
And here is
How to force a Hardware Abstraction Layer during an upgrade or an installation of Windows XP.
CAREFUL, THOUGH! This is referenced here only as an additional resource, and it is NOT my recommendation for users to force a Standard PC HAL when they ignore if their system is ACPI or not, and when they do not experience problems that cannot be alleviated in any other way.
My suggestion is, following Microsoft's recommendation, to make sure that the BIOS setting for PnP/PCI Configurations is
Disabled ; e.g. in the image below it's set to Auto(ESCD) and it would require being changed.