is it the board thats the problem?

just made a pc
iv got a stack of problems.
my board is a Gigabyte GA8i915ME-GL, with p4 775 2 DDR400 slots 2pci slots and a pci-e i. XPpro. For 3 weeks it was working adequately except that it said Memory runs at single channel under the award bios logo at the start and dxdiag says i have 512mb of ram not 1024. i got a matched pair of twinmos DDR400 512mb sticks and there's only 2 slots. it still works ok with both sticks in but wont boot up with one. ive tried every combination there is.
just put in me new pci soundcard (e-mu 0404) installed drivers and and it was all smooth for a few days. did some recording, bit of cubase. wicked. turned it on the other day and suddenly i cant get a peep out of it. WMplayer acts like its playing the song but the visualisation shows nothing or very few frames per minute. i start up FLstudio5 and it's sposed to play a fat intro sound. nothing. its got a little oscilloscope where you can see the sound happening, it struggles to play and the cursor alternates regularly between normal/hourglass. no sound from media player either. it wont even play system sounds. ive exhausted the XP troubleshooter, yes,uninstalled and reinstalled the (latest) drivers, tried turning off ac97 audio in the blue screen. i think i got rid of the onboard audio drivers (only with add/remove progs)
e-mu's website is sh#.
i managed to get it to work, someone suggested i change the slot so i uninstalled the drivers.restart.shut down.put the emu in the other slot.feathers everywhere.reinstalled the drivers.let it restart.and it worked! when i shut down and restarted the second time it was fuct again. changing the slot again brought it back and iv done this a few times now.
somtimes the driver reinstall leads to there being no sound at all. says its fine, looks fine but nothing. repeat the driver install and it works - until i turn it off. this thing happened pretty suddenly, by itself and it was all fine for ages to start with. the device's properties consistently say its working fine and theres no conflicts.
my thanks for reading all that, i really apreciate your help

i think it the RAM, you should try harder to get it to run with one stick of RAM, look at the motherboard manual and it should tell you what types of RAM are good for the board and what slot it should go in for one stick

this is most likely caused by not picking the right RAM and mixing and matching, you almost always get the dual channel turned off which slows down the RAM and some boards can be picky about brands/specs of the RAM

you may also want to run memtest86 of the comp to check if you have bad ram, if its bad your going to want to return the ram or else you will always have problems

and parts of thins may be caused by software, but i would see how memtest goes first

the chinese guy at mboard tech. supp. - (f**king useless) suggested not very articulately that i might try memtest86 so i downloaded a copy but while reading the instructions i noticed i was well out of my depth. i just about got it onto a bootable floppy, restarted and got a constant pattern of code and no further. a ditched the disk and gave up on it. there's no windows interface is there? also got the impression it wasn't designed for those with just 2 slots. bit too technical for me. any advice on the soundcard freak out. its doing me nut in

If the motherboard is still under waranty, I'd suggest getting a return materiel authorization and replacing it... too many things going wrong there, though it may very well a bad memory combination like edman said.

Take it back and request a replacement mobo. Or atleast get them to check it works.

nice1, yeah ill probably RMA it as im running out of options. shame, as i rely on the PC as a production tool quite frequently, and it'll take some days.
aside from a hardware fault (looking most likely- i did stick it together myself) is there anything else that could be causing the sound to fail when i start up after shutting down? ive been told it could be to do with an unsigned driver for the emu card, (manual said it's fine, continue anyway, been tested with XP, and that 'most notably' all thats missing is digital rights management) so i continued and it worked for a bit.
someone else told me to reinstall windows, i thought (because the fault cropped up so spontaneously) that this probably wasn't gonna solve it so i haven't done it yet. something to try i spose unless im told different. lotta backing up.
what about windows update? is it worth setting up a net
connection for? (its up in my room far away at the moment)
someone else again said that it could be caused by still having a remnant of the old onboard audio still there and windows getting confused with the new drivers. <-this guy was v.a.u.g.e. underlying factor though, is it worked fine with onboard AC97 then with both and suddenly one day i boot up and nothing.
im lost with all this, please help. forever grateful.

just reinstalled windows. didn't help at all.
what do i do now?