My system would consistently freeze up after a while and I have traced a problem to my ISA sound card. When playing music, after a while the system does a complete freeze up where a hard reset is necessary. I am now running SETI@Home to test stability and everything is working fine. The card is a SoundBlaster (Pro I think) but I could hardly find any information on this card with searches and visiting the Creative website. It works fine in Windows, though. I used sndconfig (running Red Hat 9) and I had to guess the settings. I found one successful configuration: address 220, IRQ 7, DMA 1. I do not believe there are others that will work, but I could try again. I suppose the answer would be to invest in a well-supported PCI sound card, right?

LOL
yeah probably.
But first, try to turn off all Plug and Play thing.... I don't trust that thing very much. Have you looked to log files for tips?

I am a relative newbie so I wouldn't really know about that. COuld you tell me the location of the log file?

/var/log/messages in most distros.

Hmm... Will any PCI sound card be detected? I'm not looking to get a fancy 5.1 sound card; any basic card will do. Also, I think I remember seeing some website that listed all Linux-compatible hardware ?

Yes, I think any pci card will be supported.
Get a Creative Lab Pci 128 (cost around 25$) it should be good