Plug and pray "killed" me!

Plug&Play is kinda evil.  And if you've detected your hardware without PnP enabled, and then enable it, odd things happen (like this).

Wihtout PnP, a non-PCI device is detected as a legacy device (ISA cards or embedded devices, keyboards, etc).

You claimed that you removed the doubled-up items from the device manager, but I'm not clear on if you removed ONE item, or BOTH items.  

What you need to do is remove BOTH items of a doubled-up item while in Safe Mode.  Then shutdown the system and reboot.

Unless you've already tried this, I beleive it will solve your problem.

Or simply try removing the origonal ones!

That's assuming he can tell them apart.  I don't think you can unless you look at the actual registry entries.

in bios mode seleckt irq available and take the manual then use the irq who is used by your hardware that makes trouble an selekt an manual irq. then start w98 the hardware detect will start and all hardware will be detect. goto coltrol center and delete the older hradware that was detected on erlier time. restart windows and this fix the problem.
greeting from moonblaster.

mziese, your are new to this site, and with that, welcome. However, unlike Newsgroups and Usenets, we observe a protocol or policy at this site with which you should become familiar. Experts do not post proposed answers that are incomplete or that are speculative, nor do they post proposed answers that incorporate the comments of others that have preceded you. Since questioners can accept comments as answers, it is beneficial to the questioner that speculative answers be posted as comments, especially when the issue involves further troubleshooting.
In this particular case your proposed answer was, at best, a guess and obviously was not a method to resolve duplcate device entries and should have been merely a comment. We hope that you will follow the protocols and netiquette that other techs have observed here for quite some time. Thanks you in advance for you cooperation. Kindly withdraw your proposed answer in order to reopen this issue.

Dennis

Had this happen to me a couple of times (esp. Acers).  Dangerous procedure, but it has worked for me.  Remove EVERYTHING from the device manager.  It will find everything and it will add it and since you don't have any devices, it will re-add them and all will be good (at least you hope! =) )

Malinon:

"What you need to do is remove BOTH items of a doubled-up item while in Safe Mode." - I tried this too. Some of my [explaination] explaination got cut out.
Anyway, it didn't help as the next time I rebooted, all of these items were found again and doubled up.

To all others: I haven't had time to review your suggestions.  Thank you!! I'll continue this in two days.

I'm just commenting so I can monitor the conversation. I recently had a similar problem and may have and answer. Try everone elses suggestions first, especially Dennis's.

One question though, are all of your devices PCI?

thetdk: yes, all PCI
dew_associates: Your idea is a slight variation of what I tried.  You've given me some good ideas. Thanks.. I'll try your suggestions and report back asap.

Okay, I'll wait on you!

everyone: Thank you for your help.
dew_associates: Since you had the most 'correct'  answer, I'm happy to award you with the points.  

The solution, however, turned out to be much easier than expected. Some program actually backed up the "system.dat" file back about 2 months ago (which was good enough) so I replaced the newest one with this backed up registry and turned off PnP (BIOS)... rebooted. Now all is well!!

To prevent such an occurrence in the future, this is what I did (I didn't have a chance to do this before the mishap!!):

1. Using Partition Magic 5, I repartitioned the 8gb HD into 1.5gb/7gb.  
2. Removed many of the applications and re-installed them on the new D: partition (d:\program files\..) in order to make the C: partition as small as possible.  
3. Permanently removed PM 5 (did not require it any longer)
4. Ran Norton Ghost - Partition to Image. Imaged C: (high compression) to a file on D:
5. Burned the resulting Ghost image (610mb) to a CD ROM.

Next time something "bad" happens, I'll have a fully recoverable image available.  I've been using this (and similar methods) since Ghost first arrived on the market about 2 years ago for all NT/95/98 workstations - works like a charm!!

Take care all!

Glad you're back!

Thanks...
BTW, I have a 500pts plus question in the Outlook SIG.  Give that one a 'crack'.