Well bud, believe it or not, this past saturday i installed win2k on a formatted partition for the first time. I've had the EXACT same symptoms as you--and have tried everything that everyone here suggested, including things on my own, plus ideas from people over at www.arstechnica.com in the openforum. You are using a RIVA TNT based video card. It turns out that this was the problem. I solved the problem today, and I am still completely amazed how easy it was.
What you need is a particular device driver, but not one available on the creative labs site.
Here is the site that you can get the NVidia 7.17 Driver from: http://zoiah.m3dzone.com/
Here is the forum posting that I found the link in (the actual posting is off topic): http://arstechnica.infopop.net/OpenTopic...amp;m=988096582
If this does not solve you problem, plesae post here in case i experience more problems myself.
Polish Hammer