thanks for replying everyone

tripstone: my cd-rom is ide, i was working properly before the reboot.. I installed some critical updates from "microsoft update"... I tried to uninstall all of them.. but didnt solve the problem. my cd-rom is secondary master, and cd-rw is the secondary slave... cd-rom itself does not have any sharing conflict. cd-rom drive letter is M: and cd-rw is N: because i have a bunch of partitions, c: d: e:... and so on

windows reports that my cd-rom is working properly.. just like any other devices.

I have 2 HDs, one 6.4 gig seagate (primary master), and one 40gig western digital (primary slave) on a 440LX intel chipset ( I know it sucks.. but Im just glab it still working)

according to conflict manager, my sound card and usb unviersal host controller are having the hardware resource sharing problem on IRQ 10. anyone here know how to modify the IRQ #s manually? my BIOS doesnt seem to have this option.

also when I checked the device manager under computer manager, it shows my cd-rom# 4, the nubmer seems to increase whenever I reinstall the driver for my cd-rom/cd-rw. anyone know how to delete or change the number back to 1 or 0?

tyia
eom