Too many shared IRQs?

A lot of books claim that two devices with the same IRQ can cause lots of trouble and that very few devices can share an IRQ without problems.

On my computer using windows 2000 and a via chipset I have these conflicts/sharing.

Resource Device
IRQ 11 NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4200 with AGP8X
IRQ 11 Intel 8255x-based PCI Ethernet Adapter (10/100)
IRQ 11 Santa Cruz(tm)
IRQ 11 WinFast TV2000 XP WDM Video Capture
IRQ 11 VIA USB Universal Host Controller
IRQ 11 VIA USB Universal Host Controller
IRQ 11 VIA USB Universal Host Controller
IRQ 11 HPT372 UDMA/ATA133 RAID Controller

I've been using it for over a year without a problem so I'm not asking how to fix it because there is nothing wrong. I wanted a little explination on how this works because according to all my text books it's not possible.

Thanks for the feedback from the hardware experts out there.

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Comments

RussS

W2k and XP are able to share IRQs in a manner that 9x could not. I think 9 and 11 are the ones most used.

bellboy

irq questions are specifically there to allow for the fact that not all operating systems allow sharing or irq steering. i believe that windows 98 (or rather the second edition version that i am used to) will allow devices to share irq, but previous versions of windows may not.