I'm running a Dell R400, 800MHz with 384MB ram and windows 2000.

Everythings been running pretty smoothly for almost a year now.

Last week I purchased Acronis 7.0 in order to image multiple disks and
found that I could move to about the third screen and would get a BSOD
and memory dump. This apparently triggered by "usbarw.sys" which is
from my ScanDisk 73 combo flash reader.

This auto reboot is predictable and repeatable. I disable the card
reader, Acronis works, I reinstall the card reader Acronis doesn't.
I've sent emails to tech support to figure this out but I have another
issue I'm puzzled by.

As I was trying to debug the above, I did all of the standard and
"bad" things.

At one point I was desparate enough to perform an "upgrade in place"
for Windows 2000. Following this, I downloaded the critical and
recommended patches for 2K, one of which was SP4.

Here's where I'm confused. My graphics went to pot within minutes,
can't say that it was immediate but probably after the first reboot
with SP4. By this I mean that the screen looked like I had set it to
16 colors instead of 256 or 32 bit. Checked all my drivers, checked
memory dimms, even checked monitor buttons to see if I had screwed
something up accidentally. No joy. On top of that my sound went
away...ie...it wasn't muted, it just didn't make any noise.

These are ACS495 speakers, again old, but workable

After about a day of working various aspects, I decided to roll back
SP4 which seemed to solve the graphics issue. I had my picture back.
What it didn't solve was the sound.

I've got an old Aureal Montego (8820) card but even though it's old,
it's worked fine for years. I've checked the drivers which seem to be
good and can't find any other conflicts. I do a diagdx test from a
terminal window and it say's things are "working", I just can't hear
anything. I've run Aida32 against the system to see if anything jumps
out at me and it all looks fine.

At this point I'm stumped....anyone see anything I've missed...?

Best thing you could tell me is that there's a fuse or something on
the speakers I just haven't found. The buttons on the satelite's....?

I know that the easiest solution would probably be just buying a new
sound card but I haven't done anything other than microsoft's update
to this thing and I'm real curious as to what's going on.