Why bluescreen on audio device driver load?

this is bizarre... HP DC7100, and I'm reinstalling Windows XP for the third time [different hard drives]. never seen this in the other successful installs.
When I go to load the realtek AC97 driver, I get a bluescreen crash & mem dump.... Do I need to go into the registry and remove all the audio devices registered?

and why does it say "Driver Not Found. Please Reboot and run this again"?
just bizarre... never seen that kind of message

 

just to update the saga. looking around the web, lots of people have this issue with various fixes and degrees of success/failure. part of the issue is source for driver: is it 'ADI' or is it 'Realtek' ? both claim "AC'97' parts and drivers. If I attempt to use any of the intel/realtek driver install packages, I get a BSOD at the end of the install. Gotta go to safe mode and uinstall devices [but what about drivers?] to get system back up. If I use the ADI supplied package [again, an executable... very dicey] I get the baffling message "NO Device Driver Found. Reboot and run this again" which of course produces nothing but a recursive fail.

this worked before.... its working on another system in my very home in fact. why not here? . my assumption is that there is another device driver unneeded in the system that is the real culprit.

 

which dc7100 do you have, on hp's support page, it lists three:
HP Compaq dc7100 Convertible Minitower PC
HP Compaq dc7100 Small Form Factor PC
HP Compaq dc7100 Ultra-slim Desktop PC

funny thing is, I don't see an audio driver listed for any of them in xp home or pro. Did you downgrade from Vista?

 

I think you just installed the wrong driver on that system ,bringing about a crash dump error. Download everest ultimate edition , its free, use it to check on the actual sound driver , proceed to the realtek website and download the driver there.Realtek Ac97 isnt high definition so u can easily find it.
N B ; before u proceed in installing make u do a system restore to the date and time of reformat, start all over driver installation.

 

solved Re: Why bluescreen on audio device driver load?

thank you both for taking your time to respond.

an HP "chat" support guy essentially admitted that the driver had been pulled. I have had several DC7100's and DC7600s and use one of the latter daily [like now] as my main workhorse, and I'm quite sure that until recently the Audio drivers were listed on the site just like they should be. these are terrific desktops, btw... 7700 even better

So, from reading MANY googled-up threads similar to mine on various platforms with AC'97 versions codec, I took a guess that there seemed more problems in later years than earlier. So I found a huge 'grab bag' of AC'97 stuff, actually two of them at different times, and picked the older one. it was pre Win XP for the most part but did include the WDM files/etc. I had already uninstalled everything I could find in the system audio-wise includin MS legacy audio stack.
So, I let the Windows discover thing try install, and pointed it to Win98 drivers folder, then it asked for something else and I pointed it at the WDM folder. Snatched a list of files there, loaded everything up, and it is performing just dandy now.

what a mess.