Well like lnguyen I too now pick my purchases very carefully so I haven't had a huge number of problems in the past number of years. I could just be lucky of course. It seems like the products here range from accross the spectrum, with a few repeat exceptions, that doesn't surprise me too much I've found that a lot of people go through utter hell with a product while another person, with almost the same system specs, report that it is the best product they ever purchased. A lot of the problems stem from pure bad luck, sometimes you just end up with something from a bad batch or the one that was droped or bumbed one too many times in its shipment from Taiwan or Malaysia or even accross the street. One thing I've noticed is that my headaches with computers have become noticeably fewer as time passes, this has mostly to do with gained wisdome due to hundreds of hours of reading/tinkering and experience, but it also has to do with improvements in hardware like the fazing out of ISA, introduction of busmastering, resource sharing and the implimentaion of many standards. The last time I had a serious IRQ/DMA or COM conflic was years ago, not that it can't happen now but things have improved a lot. There are a few things that have bothered me recently though:
ATI TV Wonder VE - ATI really needs to get their driver act together, I had no problem under win98, if you do have a problem under win98 for anything then thats a bad sine! But under win2K its very very unstable.
Sound Blaster PCI 128 - usually SB cards are no problem but the drivers for this card seemed really poorly designed, I never cared for the sound much either.
Really cheap Video/Sound cards - never buy a $30 - 60 no name brand video or sound card unless you know it to be good, even if you don't care about the quality, you might find yourself spending hours just getting all the stupid ? to dissapear in device manager