Well I softmodded my 9500np using the latest drivers from ati's website, it works great. My roommate was so impressed he went out and bought the same card. He hasn't got around to soft modding his yet but I noticed he has a number of extra ati specific panels under windows display properties that I don't have. Right now I only see the usual tabs with no "advanced" ati controls. What's the deal? Is it not possible to access these with the patched driver?
Actually this happened to me once with the wizard patch but it never happened to me with rivatuner. It seems that you missed up with the drivers before installing soft9700. Installing rivatuner should not prevent you from accessing the advanced tab. Remove all the drivers then reinstall them again and make sure that windows "cryptographic services" and "windows installer service" are enabled before the installation. Then install soft9700 according to unwinders instructions. If you got the problem again then it is your mistake somewhere, somehow. Also go to Start----->run, and type: dxdiag then press "Enter". Then press the "display" tab. The dxdiagnostic utility must state that you have 9700nonpro chip with 128mb of memory. And it should also state that "direct draw acceleration" is enabled, and "direct3d acceleration" is enabled, and "Agp texture acceleration" is enabled. Otherwise windows is not detecting correctly your modded card.
One more thing: do not expect to get the ati "advanced" tab options if the ati control panel was not installed. You need to install the ati graphics card drivers, then the ati control panel drivers, then rivatuner, then soft9700.