A good friend required a computer to run software that came with his new
chemical laboratory test equipment.  We purchased a simple computer from
a local vendor.  It has a PCChips motherboard with 512K cache.  It was
supplied with Win 95, OSR2, running a FAT 32, a 2G HD, a 24X CDROM,
3-1/2 Flpy, and a 56K modem but the sound and video was part of the
motherboard! The system was originally configured for Comm 1 = mouse,
comm 2 = modem and comm 4 = spare serial port.  It also came with 32 Meg
SDRA which was expanded to 64 meg, because the test equipment software
required it.  The vendor did reconfigure the serial ports (again to
accomodate the test equipment software) to Comm 1 and Comm 2 being free
and Comm 3 being the modem.  The mouse is now a PS/2 mouse.

The special test equipment software uses a DAC circuit card (Digital to
Analog) which is added to an ISA slot in the computer.  It requires
IRQ's 10 and 11 for use.  In CMOS, we reserved IRQ's 10 and 11 (in AMI
Bios) for ISA/EISA usage.  The board also requires Comm 1 and Comm 2 to
be free because it will use those ports to obtain the test data.  The
modem on comm 3 has a different IRQ assigned than the one on comm 1, so
there is no conflict there.

The problem:  After the test equipment software was loaded, whenever an
attempt was made to run it, Windows 95 (OSR2) came back with a blue
screen with a fatal exception message on it.

"A fatal exception OE has occurred at 0028:C003028C in VXD  VPICD ()L) +
00001AC8.... the application will be terminated ....."

We cannot find any conflicts, anywhere.  Since the video is part of the
motherboard, there are no drivers identified for it under Control
Panel/Display.

I tried to reserve a video memory area (is this a throwback to win 3.1x
features??) in the SYSTEM.INI file under 386ENH by adding EMMEXCLUDE=
A000-CFFF.  This did not seem to help at all.

Any help, insight or other information sources would be greatly
appreciated.
--
Jean Bourvic