Let me take a guess: it's a Hauppauge card? If so, then I can assure you it's the drivers; they have a long and distinguished history of screwing up like that.
In any case, if it works with a different version of Windows then it's highly unlikely to be a BIOS/mobo problem. Certainly the different platform brought on the problem, but at the end of the day it's likely something the drivers are doing wrong that doesn't get along with your Zacate setup, ergo it's a driver problem.
It is FusionHDTV7 Dual Express by DviCO. Come to think of it, have yet to deal with any Hauppauge product, actually. Anyway, thank you for mentioning the possible driver problem. So I went ahead and reinstall a clean copy of Windows XP, instead of trying to migrate one like before, and after it went through the whole installation processes, show the "welcome", do the showing of start menu, and without any driver installed other than the ones that Windows install, I shut down the system and plug in the card. Then deja vu, Windows hang. More details to follow below as part of the reply to Nothinman...
I would say that's the long term solution...
Well, after some thought, I thought about using the 64-bit Windows 7 as long term solution rather than temporary, so after the Windows XP installation mentioned just above did not work out, I went and install Windows 7 64-bit again and decide to play around with it more. Also, as mentioned, Windows 7 64-bit can boot in without hanging even with the card added. Therefore, this time, I thought I can add in the TV card later after install some of the main drivers, i.e. display and whatever. Did that, shut the system down, and add in the card.
Lo and behold, the 64-bit Windows 7 hangs as well, to my surprise!! At this time, I was baffled because it was not hanging last night, but then I did not install anything when trying to boot the 64-bit Windows last night. So the logical course of action, at least I thought it was, is to uninstall everything that I installed and tried again. After the removal of AMD/ATI drivers, Windows 7 was able to boot in with card added.
"No problems then" I thought, and attempted to install AMD drivers again with Windows booted in and card still in slot. Upon the part where the installer trying to determine what hardware the system have, Windows froze. At this time, I thought it was AMD's Catalyst Install Manager that cause the problem. So after rebooting, I tried to install the driver by going into Device Manager and Update the driver manually, the display driver anyway. The driver did install without problem and prompted me to reboot. Did that and Windows was booting in past the logo screen, but hangs at the very next black screen.
Shut down, remove the card, boot into Windows, remove the driver, reboot with card added, were the next few steps I took. At this time, I really thought AMD drivers are the problem, so I tried to install couple other drivers manually without using their installer. But drivers like the PCIE driver did not give any problems and allow the system to reboot into Windows without problem.
The very next step is basically a big revelation of how I arrived at my current conclusion of this whole problem. I went and used the Device Manager again because I was not sure what other AMD drivers other than display should I install. I used the "Scan for hardware change" function and the system froze similar to what Catalyst Install Manager was trying to do trying to install drivers.
Therefore, my current conclusion is that there is some weird incompatibility between the TV card and something on the motherboard, it could very well be the APU, GPU, whatever. Anyway, the incompatibility of the hardware causes the software to froze up, hanging, or non responding, as the software tried to access certain functions, features, or do system calls to particular parts of the hardware.
I know ViRGE might still say that it is the drivers, and he is right, but I think drivers are only partly to blame. Because I tried the TV card on two different systems, I also put different PCIE cards into the E350, but the Windows XP on whether E350 with other cards or the other systems with TV card never hang like like it does with E350 and TV card.
And while I was able to track down the problem slightly further, I am not sure who to contact about the problem anymore. There are four parties involved and contacting each of them will be fine, but they might just kick me around and tell me to ask the other ones for answers.
Anyway, thanks for reading this very long thing. The problem is not yet solved. And any type of help would be greatly appreciated.