The system I am working on at the moment has me stumped and would appreciate any help.
After putting the system together, I formatted and did a fresh install of Win 98SE, everything seemed to go without a hitch, Until 1st boot into windows I get a black screen with a few icons trying to show here and there....Then the system freezes
I rebooted the system in safe mode (no problems) to see if I could check any issues in Device manager. There were no Exclamation marks on the hardware everything seems to be fine. Checked out System Information and noticed the IRQ are all free. I'm thinking this is the problem.
So I installed the VIA 4x1 chipset drivers and updated the BIOS for this M/B
Reinstalled win 98se same thing again..
Ready to give up, I installed my copy of Win XP and it is running perfect...
Can anyone shed any light as to why Win xp would work and not Win 98

The specs are as follows:
GA 6VXC7-4x Socket 370
PIII 866
PC133 SDram
PCI Riva TNT
Creative soundcard
Generic case and 400w power supply
20 GB IDE hard drive

Whenever you install an OS on hardware newer than the OS you need to take extra precautions when installing.

Rather than allow Windows to install the hardware you should hit Escape each time. Then install the drivers as needed. It sometimes helps to leave out any add in hardware until after you have the OS running right.

Did you set the BIOS for plug and play aware OS?

Check IRQs in Device Manager after a reboot.

Did the problem start before or after you installed the necessary nvidia drivers?

OtheHill and DAVEINCAPS
I built this system from three older systems just picked out the best parts from each to make one.
The older systems were working fine with there respective parts in place.So there is no indication of the hardware being at fault
When I assembled the PC above, All I had in place was the Motherboard, CPU, Ram, Hard Drive and Video Card...
I had installed nothing other than win98 when I had the issue. It just never booted into win98 other than in safe mode...
Runs perfect on winxp, however I need to run win 98 on the machine as its for an older person who is addiment on having win98...

Did you set the BIOS for plug and play aware OS?
No I did'nt will this make a difference

Thanks for your help

Yes it may. Older boards were not able to configure the resources effiecently. Win98 can allocate the IRQs properly. The BIOS should also have a setting to reserve an IRQ for the video. AGP is an extension of the PCI bus. Set to use what you have.