I am not very knowledgeable in IRQ conflicts as of yet, but I have been suffering system freezes when loading OpenGL apps. I think it could be IRQ related.

Fortunately, IRQ Conflicts are pretty much a thing of the past. Today's operating systems can handle "sharing" IRQ's far better than even windows 98 was able to.

OpenGL applications causing freezing on your computer would be more a video driver/video card issue than anything else.

What video card driver version do you have?

Oh, thanks.

I have an HIS HD Radeon 3870x2

I have the Catalyst 8.8 drivers. For some reason, when I update to newer drivers my entire system will blue screen and display a memory dump like "these drivers may cause harm to your hardware" and restart.

So updating to newer drivers isn't an option for me

Odd thing is, I can play DirectX games just fine.

Techextreme is correct, though I have never seen a negative IRQ nor should the gfx card be using 2 irqs neither? Even though the gfx card is a dual card on one board so maybe that part is ok, I have never personally looked into it. If you are concerened you can change the settings in the bios to the opposite of what they are.

ie if you have selected "let os decide" then switch it to bios controlled (i forget the exact teminology used sorry :/ been a long time!)
This would then force an irq reshuffle (and also the drivers may need to be reinstalled as the irq's will be different the devices will be redetected)

The driver issue, try uninstalling the original drivers first, (make sure you have a copy of them to hand incase it doesnt work, system restore is you friend ) reboot then install latest.
Sometimes vendors make there own drivers as they may have changed something on the board so try the HIS website to see if they offer newer drivers there (though most likely they will redirect you to amd to get the catalyst they have on offer though :/ )

Also are you using daemon tools? I noticed the strange IDE driver, have you tried disabling that too?

Negative Irqs are a weird phenomenon that can be caused by MSI's as explained here http://support.microsoft.com/kb/940394 (but with no resolution so i guess its a "normal" thing?)
So i would put it down to a driver to be honest. But it cant hurt forcing the irqs to re-evaluate (those irq's are virtual as there are only 16 irq's on a system (15 useable as 0 is reserved))

Let me know how you get on!

High500