And what sound card do you have? What motherboard? BIOS revisions? Drivers?
 
Some clues beyond "it doesn't work. how do i fix it?" would help enormously.
 
 
 
------------------
SuperMicro P6DBS (dual UW-SCSI) BIOS 2.2, 2*Celery 300a @ 450Mhz, 384MB PC100 RAM
SCSI-A=4.3Gb+9Gb, SCSI-B=Tosh32x CD-ROM, Yamaha4416 CD-RW, Iomega ZIP100, IDE1=4.3Gb
IBM EtherJet 10/100 NIC PCI + Nortel ADSL "modem"
Matrox G400 DH 32Mb AGP + Quantum3D Voodoo2 SLI PCI (CL TNT1 AGP on a shelf)
SoundBlaster Live PCI (not Value)
Win2K build 2195 Retail (not 120-day eval)

Dual P-III 650
Tyan 1837UANG-R
Intel 10-100 TX
Creative TNT2 ULTRA
U2W Dual Channel SCSI
Promise Ultra 66
Creative Audio PCI
Creative SBLIVE Platinum
Promise IEEE 1394 Firewire
Sigma Hollywood Plus
Hauppauge Wincast-FM
4 WD 13.6 GB IDE
Sony DVD 220-E
Sony CDRW 140-E
Creative DVD-RAM
Iomega Jaz 2GB SSI
Iomega Zip 250 IDE
Iomega Zip 250 USB
Seagate 20GB Tape IDE
512 Meg PC133 DIMM
 
Yes, I'm aware..it's rediculously alot..but its for media authoring
 
the question though is how to load the drivers for the audiopci (1371 chip)

running win2k advanced server
 
build 2195 Retail

You've kept the actual information about the problem to a minimun - obviously to test our powers of deduction - but here goes...
 
OK. The device is listed in the HCL, so a driver for this card ships with W2K.
 
I would normally assume that you've tried installing said driver, and adjusting the settings in Control Panel, Sounds, Audio and CP,S,Hardware - and that somehow this doesn't work...but you refer to an NT driver...
 
Did you try and install the NT4 driver? Maybe even the NT4 LiveWare kludge? Both these options would be bad - (a) because there is a native driver, and ( because the NT4 LiveWare kludge does not support SMP.
 
So maybe you did use the native driver, and things went pear-shaped. Without knowing the actual nature of the error, I'm forced into conjecture, but...
 
It could be that the SB Live and the Audio are conflicting in some way - perhaps even sharing an IRQ. Does the device manager show any useful info about the two cards? Have you tried removing the SB Live while installing the Audio driver?
 
It could be an ACPI issue - try disabling ACPI in the mobo BIOS, and changing the driver in Device Manager, My Computer from ACPI MultiProcessor to MPS MultiProcessor.
 
On the other hand - it could be something else altogether. You might want to provide some more information...

Okay..One more try..
 
is there a way to safely and effectively install the nt4 audiopci drivers in 2000 so that they will correctly register with apci etc...
 
or do they simply install in legacy mode only?

Why do you want to install the NT4 drivers, when W2K ships with native drivers for that card?

because the "native driver dont's support the wavetablke synth in the audio pci..
and practically no midi sequencer recognizes the ms softsynth or more to the point would want to
 
this isn't a semantic debate..its simply a question of how to do it..