sorry to post a very common question, but I didn't find any help in older posts...

I'm trying to run Blood (with Plasma Pack) on a Win2k SP4 machine. My soundcard is one of those cheap AC97 codec equipped cards integrated on my motherboard. I've followed all of the steps described on the "How to play Build engine games...", but the game will not work. Once I launch Blood from the supplied shortcut I get a "Fatal Error" message from Windows: "Unhandled exception encountered while loading".
Pressing the OK button on the error window results in Blood starting, but as soon as it gets to the "Loading sound system" (or whatever it is) I'm taken back to Windows.
I've followed all of the steps suggested, installed all the software and patched my Blood executable. Set up the card from Blood setup.exe (setup reports "Sound Blaster non responding", but I was able to leave the settings and manually edit blood.cfg to select max bits, voices and mix rate as suggested). Din't work anyway...
Any suggestion? Thanks in advance.
Berserker79