BF Vietnam Freezes; EA says IRQ Conflict???

This ones a doozy. I have been having problems with my comp freezing when running EA Games "Battlefield Vietnam". After adjusting the video cache and sound buffer files I still experienced freezing. I updated WinXP w/ SP1a, Updated my video Driver from Nvidia and Updated my VIA drivers. EA Support pointed out that the problem could be due to an IRQ Conflict between my Video Card & Onboard Sound sharing the same IRQ. NOTE: THIS IS THE ONLY APPLICATION THAT I'VE NOTICED PROBLEMS WORTH MENTION. My specs are:

994 MHZ AMD Thunderbird
1G SDRamm
WINXP (+SP1a)
NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 U (AGP)
Onboard Sound (VIA AC'97)
DirectX 9.0

XP Shows The following IRQ Assignments:
IRQ 11 Microsoft ACPI-Compliant System OK
IRQ 11 NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 Ultra OK
IRQ 11 VIA Rev 5 or later USB Universal Host OK
IRQ 11 VIA REv 5 or later USB Universal Host OK
IRQ 11 NETGEAR FA311 Fast Ethernet Adapter OK
IRQ 11 Primary IDE Channel OK
IRQ 14 Primary IDE Channel OK
IRQ 15 Secondary IDE Channel OK
IRQ 0 System Timer OK
IRQ 8 System CMOS/real time clock OK
IRQ 13 Numberic data processor OK
IRQ 6 Standard Floppy disk controller OK
IRQ 4 Comm Port (COM1) OK
IRQ 3 Comm Port (COM2) OK
IRQ 1 Keyboard

I've read that Video cards should have their own IRQ -BUT- I've also read that its perfectly normal for IRQ Sharing (steering?) in XP. (?) Other posts mention that I WOULD NOT want to manually assign IRQs in BIOS because the system could be unstable. One person suggested that is disable the COM1 & COM2 ports in hopes that the AGP slot would receive one of the unused IRQs (3 or 4)- but it didn't sound like it was guaranteed. I'm at a complete loss as to how to procede. I would like to get this game running but I don't think it would be worth taking extreme measures to do so. I also don't understand why if there is a IRQ conflict it only shows up in BFV (and XP doesnt detect a conflict). Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.