Bad experience with latest Detonators

I started this morning by flashing my mainboard bios from 9-11-01 to 12-15-01, d/l and installed the latest detonator set, and upgraded Direct-X 8.0 to 8.1 today.

Then nothing worked right.

The ECS bios upgrade worked ok by itself, but it is apparently dumbed down for "stability" I guess. My memory bandwidth was actually lower on the latest bios, even when O/C'ing the fsb to the same 138/138.

Games and stuff played fine with the new bios until I installed the detonator win'9x 23.11 drivers. This upgraded my 21.83 set, but then my games just locked up. I'm using a Leadtek Ti-200 clocked 225/490. No, the video O/C wasn't the problem, because the lockups occurred at factory video clock defaults too.

Episode I Racer was effected the worst. Upon updating my detonators, my USB Logitech Wingman Force3D suddenly refused to work at all in the game. Then whenever I tried to exit the game, It completely locked up. I couldn't even cont/alt/del.

Is it possible for a video driver to mess up the USB? I can't imagine the joystick being effected by a video driver.

I set all clock speed to factory default, reistalled the SIS AGP driver, and even upgraded to direct-x 8.1. Still this game locked up like crazy. I even deleted the drivers in safemode, tried reinstalling the game, everything.

That game just refuses to play using the 23.11 detonators. Since my machine was actually slowed down by the new ECS bios, I eventually reflashed back to the old O/C beta bios.

In the end, the only thing that I kept was direct-x 8.1. Weird.

Specs: ECS K7S5A, XP-1600+ @ 1.44 GHz, fsb/agp 138/138, 2x256 Crucial pc2100, memory timing ultra, CAS2, etc. Leadtek Geforce3 Ti-200 225/490, TurtleBeach MontegoII quadzilla, Logitech Wingman Force 3D,