For the last six months my system had been working great. Then about two weeks ago I installed a Linksys 10/100 Ethernet card for a new cable modem connection. Immediately after installation I started noticing that the mouse icon was showing the "busy" icon (large hourglass) and the "working in background" icon (pointer with small hourglass) about every 3 seconds or so whenever I was moving the mouse - system performance did not seem to be affected and the sound and video appeared normal. I went out and bought a Siemens Speedstream 10/100 Ethernet card the next day thinking it was just the Ethernet card. I was wrong.
I did a clean install of Windows 98 without the either Ethernet card inserted, but the "busy" icon still showed up whenever the mouse moved. Then I opened a demo of Dungeon Siege and a constantly flickering "busy" and "normal select" (arrow) would show up dead center of the screen separate from the games pointer. Since the game was in full screen mode it must have been bleeding through from the desktop?! Other games that use full-screen mode also suffer from this problem. Note that the video and sound in the games were normal.
I decided to start removing cards until the problem stopped. I pulled the Audigy card first (and enabled the onboard AC-97 Audio) and the flashing "busy" mouse pointer disappeared - home run! I then contacted Creative to see if they would replace it. Well nothing is easy in life, so they started having me update drivers, update BIOS, and change PCI bus settings. I will say that I do have a very up-to-date set of BIOS and drivers right now (definitely a good thing for the AC-97 Sound), but the system still has the "busy" mouse icon whenever the Audigy card is in the system. Finally they relented on driver updates and asked me if I had another system to test the Audigy in. Not wanting to lie, I proceeded to rebuild my old PII 266 Micron until it would work again. The Audigy card went in but the "busy" mouse icon didn't appear. I then decided that it could be either the video or the motherboard and I borrowed a friend's GeForce4 and the"busy" icon is still there (at least it wasn't a $350 video card). Then I tried the Audigy card in a more modern ASUS AVM266, and it doesn't suffer from the accursed "busy" icon. On a hunch I removed my now unused 56K modem card and the "busy" icon was reduced to just an occasional flicker in one of the games so the problem is most likely related to the PCI bus.
I've done extensive searches for this type of problem but haven't found a single documented case of this type. I think it is the motherboard now, but I haven't figured out why it only occurs when the Audigy card is in the system. I'm also not sure how the PCI bus could cause a "busy" icon to appear, especially without impacting sound or video performance. And I have no clue as to how the mouse icon can bleed through a full-screen application like a game. Does anyone have any experience with this type of problem or know of a way to confirm whether it is the motherboard or Audigy card short of just replacing them?
I did a clean install of Windows 98 without the either Ethernet card inserted, but the "busy" icon still showed up whenever the mouse moved. Then I opened a demo of Dungeon Siege and a constantly flickering "busy" and "normal select" (arrow) would show up dead center of the screen separate from the games pointer. Since the game was in full screen mode it must have been bleeding through from the desktop?! Other games that use full-screen mode also suffer from this problem. Note that the video and sound in the games were normal.
I decided to start removing cards until the problem stopped. I pulled the Audigy card first (and enabled the onboard AC-97 Audio) and the flashing "busy" mouse pointer disappeared - home run! I then contacted Creative to see if they would replace it. Well nothing is easy in life, so they started having me update drivers, update BIOS, and change PCI bus settings. I will say that I do have a very up-to-date set of BIOS and drivers right now (definitely a good thing for the AC-97 Sound), but the system still has the "busy" mouse icon whenever the Audigy card is in the system. Finally they relented on driver updates and asked me if I had another system to test the Audigy in. Not wanting to lie, I proceeded to rebuild my old PII 266 Micron until it would work again. The Audigy card went in but the "busy" mouse icon didn't appear. I then decided that it could be either the video or the motherboard and I borrowed a friend's GeForce4 and the"busy" icon is still there (at least it wasn't a $350 video card). Then I tried the Audigy card in a more modern ASUS AVM266, and it doesn't suffer from the accursed "busy" icon. On a hunch I removed my now unused 56K modem card and the "busy" icon was reduced to just an occasional flicker in one of the games so the problem is most likely related to the PCI bus.
I've done extensive searches for this type of problem but haven't found a single documented case of this type. I think it is the motherboard now, but I haven't figured out why it only occurs when the Audigy card is in the system. I'm also not sure how the PCI bus could cause a "busy" icon to appear, especially without impacting sound or video performance. And I have no clue as to how the mouse icon can bleed through a full-screen application like a game. Does anyone have any experience with this type of problem or know of a way to confirm whether it is the motherboard or Audigy card short of just replacing them?
