Interesting, I've never heard of that before. I guess that since your caps weren't changed, they might be the problem here. Sound problems are often related to bad capacitors. Mine had no sound for a while and refused to switch off when I told it to before I replaced all of them.

I also got the manual for installing the card, and it suggests making a copy of the hard disk before going through the install. What do you think?

I noticed a couple of 100mb Zip disks, maybe there's a Zip drive inside one of the boxes. I wanted to make a backup but i never bought the Jaz drive to do so.

BTW, will it "work" without the software installed?