Kernel 2.2.1 (Score 1)

I had a similar problem. In my case, when I played mp3's, my SCSI CD-R drive went crazy. It turns out there was a memory conflict between my Plug 'n' Pray SB64 and my ethernet card (don't ask me how my CD-R drive got envolved, I don't really have any idea). Anyway, I too was absolutely certain that there were no io/irq conflicts, until I logged in at console and tried using mpg123 (I think I actually logged in as root), and I got this bizarre console message indicating that there was a problem. Anyway, you might want to double and triple check for io conflicts. Note I had the same problem under both '95 and NT at one point or another.