hey! glad it works, eventually anyway.
I suspect that the floppy controller, with its own option ROM, and INT 13 hooking, is what is interfering with the XTIDE. It might be clobbering what the XTIDE has done.
It may be possible, even though you said you tried it, to relocate the ROM in the floppy controller so that it gets loaded 1st, then XTIDE loads after that. You'd want to load the floppy controller as low in memory as possible, probably around C800, and then I'd suspect that keeping XTIDE at D000 would give the floppy ROM enough room.
Overall, I'm not too surprised that we'd have issues like this, and I'm really curious to see how the boot menu appears when you've got a card like this in the system (provided the XTIDE loads after the floppy, the boot menu should pick up the changes and display them)
If you still can't get them to co-exist, I might have to have you either dump the BIOS and mail it to me, or send me the card altogether so I can poke around and see what it's doing.
Actually, now that I think about it, if the floppy BIOS isn't more than 4k in size, it would be possible to merge it into XTIDE's BIOS, thus ensuring compatibility. Hmmmm.