Hmmmmm , I wonder why ppl have probs with this board.
I have one and I ordered Crucial memory from their memory selector and have had ZERO probs. I have 3 sticks of 256mb pc3200 in and have not seen a BSD.My thoughts are that the memory timings you are using are not correct.
As for the onboard sound,I have yet to put my SBL value card in, onboard sound seems to work great.