Okay, I think this means you are instructing the BIOS to allocate an IRQ, ports, and DMAs for the sound card. That could possibly result in a conflict with your modprobe command, in which you are telling the software that you know *for sure* the hardware sound card ports are at 0x530, 0x538, the IRQ is 5, and the DMAs are 0 and 1.

The point is that the arguments of the modprobe command have to match the BIOS sound card settings. If they don't, then for example a video screen type operation might try to grab one of the sound card's DMA channels, thinking it's free. The result would be a hang or crash like what you've observed.

Does the BIOS audio setup screen give you any sort of information about where the sound card ports, IRQs and DMAs have been assigned? The following link is an old sound HOWTO for Linux on the Inspiron 3200. It's not for the current versions of Linux but it mentions that the BIOS setup screen gives that information:

http://www.ps.uci.edu/~tomba/inspiro...tal-native.txt

I just noticed this part of the problem report. Do you think driver was expecting to find a sound card port at 0x538 and didn't find it there? This increases my suspicion that one or more of the modprobe parameters doesn't match the actual hardware setup in your computer.

I have googled this some more and found this:
http://www.nzgames.com/inspiron/
as well as some information from an old Damn Small Linux page.
I suspect that you need to change cport=0x538 to cport=0x388 and ensure that your BIOS settings match the settings in the modprobe line. I suspect that if you change your BIOS setting from auto to manual then you will be able make appropriate settings.

at thil point i'm assuming that there's nothing wrong with my drivers. could it be a bad compile of something to do with x11? after all I did use 12.2 disk1 & 2, and disk 3 was 12.1. the problem only happens when i do something with the audio while x11 is running. it's never crashed from the console.

Yes, a very good chance of that. There was a change in glibc versions going from 12.1 to 12.2.
It is never a good idea to mix versions.

you were right, it was port 338(checked my bios, turns ouut i already had it on manual):

SB I/O address: [220h]
WSS I/O address: [530h]
AdLib I/O address: [388h]
Interrupt: [IRQ5]
1st DMA channel: [DMA1]
2nd DMA channel: [DMA0]

but it still hangs the computer.

didnt exactly have a choice. couldn't burn cds, disk 1 and 2 were bad, had 12.1 d3, but only enough room to download and extract two of the cds(onto the xubuntu partition, and then just enough space to rip d3 onto the remaining hdd(not enough to download iso and extract to hdd).

d3 contains kde and kdei packages. could it be possible that the difference between kde 3.5.9 and 3.5.10 could be it? should i upgrade to 3.9.10? or could it be something else???

funny thing is that windows xp played music fine, but hung when i played vids on wmp, i could play flash vids, but i had to boot into safe mode in order to play wmp vids.

Does this mean that you had disks with md5 checksums different from those expected? If so, this would strongly suggest corruption of your 12.2 install media.
You only need disk 3 if you want to install KDE. If you are tight for disk space and are willing to use an alternative desktop environment i.e. xfce or a window manager such as fluxbox (favoured by most) or windowmaker (my personal favourite) then you can leave off KDE and save > 1GB of disk space.
To test whether it is an interaction with KDE, I would suggest that you use an alternative GUI (use 'xwmconfig' and make a choice apart from KDE) and try a GUI app for playing music that does not depend on KDE (e.g. audacious).
If you want KDE, then install the KDE from Slackware 12.2 disk 3 or the /kde directory (as well as /kdei if you want internationalisation support) of an appropriate mirror. Your applications should always be compiled against the glibc version used to compile the kernel. Pat Volkerding and the other Slackware developers spend a lot of time making sure that these issues are taken care of in any release. The least we can do as users is to respect their work and use it as the total system setup that they supply without mixing and matching.
Booting in safe mode in Windows installs a minimal driver set. This may have created more free memory so that wmp could run successfully or else a conflicting driver may have been stopped from being loaded.

checksums were all good, what i meant was i had burnt all 3 bout 6 months ago, the first two got so scratched they were unrepairable.

also x11 hangs using the play command from xfce.

Perhaps you should spend the money, and order the Slackware 12.2 disks from slackware.com. That way PV can feed the family and you get good install media. Sounds like a win/win to me! Sure, you are out of pocket, but I spend more just on annual subscription for antivirus software on my Windows installation. A full Slackware install is a bargain!

if i spend money itll b on a new desktop pc. i just hope wish slack the option of kde4. Im trying to build lfs, but the gcc compile keeps getting interupted(it takes 22 hrs to compile on here).