I'm beginning to wonder if this has been my major problem lately, as well.
Last year I bought a 9500 (eBay) for $50 and installed the good stuff from my 7500; an XLR8 G3/220, SIIG-133 ATA PCI card and 60G Maxtor drive, and an eclectic mix of RAM: 16, 64 and newer 128 meg sticks. All 12 RAM slots were filled with something, a mix of FPM and EDO. Remember, this worked fine in the 7500 with the G3/220.
However, when I switched to the Sonnet G4 it became very unreliable (not to mention that I had to replace my UltimateRes IXMicro video card, incapatable with the new G4...) Many strange crashes and freezes: the ATA drive disappeared when I attempted to update the internal SCSI drive from 8.6 to 9.1 (the ATA also had 8.6 on it and was the boot drive, and so far has been unrecoverable); the machine often wouldn't boot past the startup chine.
After much, much experimentation with my installed memory (and odd, sometime-repeatable memory errors using XLR8's memory tester), it seems that the 9500 has become more stable after removing the FPM memory and leaving only the EDO (I don't think it would matter if I choose the FPM over the EDO, it's just that the newer 128 meg sticks (5 total) are EDO, so they're keepers, and the FPM 64 meg sticks go to my girlfriend and the 7500 I gave her). I still have two 16 meg sticks installed, both EDO, but I may deside to give those up too, for the hope and prayer of more stability.
The SIIG card still has errors and stops during file saves and writes taking more than a few seconds, but otherwise, the 9500 has become a more stable machine by not mixing memory types. Hope this helps anyone else that has upgraded to a G4 processor card in a PCI machine.
I have heard lots of problems relating to mixing FPM and EDO in PowerMacs with G3 and especially G4 upgrades. I would definitely recommend pulling the 16MB sticks and see if things get better. You should be able to move data to and from the SIIG card, what you are describing is simply an unstable computer.
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