Ever seen Microsoft Kernel System Renderer?? and other like things show up as devices

[HobHead]

Ever seen Microsoft Kernel System Renderer?? and other like things show up as devices in device manager under sound, video + game controllers?

There are maybe 15 in all and I believe they are the source of a start-up problem I've been trying to eliminate for a long time. If i just restart computer (older Dell Pentium II 400 224MB Ram--98SE ) im usually ok but whenever machine is off overnight it will most times freeze on start-up in a blinking cursor top left corner/ black screen which I am forced to restart. Then goes into safe mode in which I used to go and remove the foreign devices or whatever from my sound card section of device manager. This would usually clear the problem for the 3rd and final start-up which would finally go to windows. Lately, I've realized (or with my last reformat/reinstall of 98SE in last week) that I don't even need to manually remove these lines, but simply go to safe mode and restart and will almost always go to windows cleanly from there so it's weird.

I'm not even sure these things getting in device manager are the only cause of the problem but I strongly suspect it. Are they from DirectX ?? I download latest version 9.c after my reinstall, but version 6 is what loads off my video driver discs right after 98 is on. Here are some more names of these things:

MS Streaming Tee/Sink-to-Sink Converter
MS Direct Music SW Synth (WDM)
MS Kernel Audio Mixer
MS Streaming Clock Proxy
NABTS/ FEC VBI Codec
BDA IPsink
BDA Slip Deframer
ClosedCaption Decoder ------> and at least 5 others, but not all will always appear.

This all started when I braved a reformat/reinstall of 98 job for the first time a while ago. I partition a new 40 GB drive to 10/30 GB's, C:/D: , which seems to work fine otherwise. Only other info I have is there is a Gina by Echo semi-professional recording sound card installed but otherwise just what came with this Dell; average sound card, video card, modem. And occasionally this system will go to blue screen :

An exception has occurred at 3206: 00000028 in VxD---. This was called from 0028: C0058E69 in VxD SHELL(01) + 00000549. hit any key

on first start-up instead of blinking cursor but I'm still forced to hit restart button. New to this Site...can anyone help...greatly appreciated.