What is the model number of the card? (CT#####)
It's possible the one you have doesn't have ISA PnP capabilities (I can't confirm if all AWE32's were ISA PnP), so resources have to be assigned manually, Or it is PnP, but the BIOS is not configuring the card at boot properly.
If you have the card version that has memory slots on-board, you will need to set a jumper appropriately to match if there is or is not memory or it could cause problems.
Protection Error might not be related. Windows 95 will do that without a patch with CPUs faster than around 400Mhz or so.
here is a patch for that. MS had a patch in the 90's too, but I can't find that.
Might not be insensible to confirm the RAM is good. iirc driver allocations usually start at the top of memory, so it could be that with some configurations it goes down into some bad memory space or something.