There were no real tricks I did, I just popped in the 2nd Colossus and fired up the system. XP saw the new card, I pointed it to the drivers and that was it. When I started up Sage again I had the new input source to configure.

I've never used SPDIF, always analog sound. For the longest time I was never affected by the stability issues causing daily reboots then one day it happened to me so I started rebooting nightly, no problems since.

No real tricks. I also have a pair of PVR-250s in my system that are usable, but currently not in use - no issues with those since adding the Colossus cards.

If my motherboard had more PCIe 1x slots I'd have added more by now. My next server rebuild will definitely include 3 or 4 hopefully (but, unfortunately, my next server rebuild probably won't include SageTV). Of course, YMMV.