Welp... 1) Nope, the first board had an AGP slot; this board has PCI-E, and the card in there is actually the 2nd one. The first one I got was a very budget Geforce 6200 with 64 megs of ram, and an oncard function that 'borrowed' free system RAM at need (placeholder until I decided what card I really wanted). As that might have been the problem, I got an Asus 6200 with 128 megs on card and no poaching. A bit of improvement, but that is all. 2) New power supply. The previous one was a 400 watt CompUSA special that performed rather well. The current one is a 550 watt MadDog rated for Athlon 64 loads. 3) Memory. It -should- be. I had 2 gigs in the old box; somewhere in the midst of all the swapping I got a fresh stick of Kingston ValueRam on the chance that the blown board did damage it. I'll check though, as it's always possible I popped one of the others in by mistake. Now that's an idea about the PCI-E doing something odd with the IRQ's. I haven't gotten under the hood of that either, really. For that matter, it might be one of the USB controllers or the SATA RAID chip doing it as well.... Oh, last major sympton! On installing Win2k, it starts copying files after the reg code input, gets to 'setting up Distributed Transaction Controller' and spontaneously reboots. Switching to a different media reader and reinstalling seems to avoid this, or a few go arounds with the reboot gets past whatever is causing the reboot. Hm. I wonder if there is something in the media reader's firmware that conflicts with the new chipsets...?