[{OF}Barney_B]

rS, I had the same sort of problems at the beginning of this year. I was using an Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe and an Athlon XP 2700+, ATi x1600 pro video card, Corsair Select 2Gb Ram (probably the same as what you are using), no SATA but two large IDE hard drives and two DVD drives, and an Audigy2 sound card. I had the same problem/problems that you are describing with XP whining about video card conflicts and what not. I removed the sound card, and 1 each hard and DVD drive. I did as Jonah suggested and reset the bios to its default settings several times and each time it seemed to help just a little more. There's a setting in your bios...something about Resources Controled by Auto ESCD. I reset that and rebooted and "voila" everything started to come together. Apparently, allowing the bios to redetect the hardware was the key. I was able to reload XP and get the system running stable again although I never did reinstall the sound card. This system went into my basement collection of neato computers and still performs a multitude of tasks but by the time I figured out what was up with it, I'd already purchased the parts to build a new system which works great. If you go back into the past posts you might find the thread I created during that dreadful time and get an idea of the things that were going in the dumper for me and all the stuff that was suggested, etc. BTW, the video card did/does have a problem but it is still working to this day, color bars and all during bootup. I'm going to run it into the dirt and when it finally dies, I'm contemplating polluting the environment by donating it to the local landfill so centuries from now some archaeologist will dig it up and have a good laugh at primitive 21st century man. (all you tree-huggers can take a valium, I've never thrown anything away computer related...it was a joke, sheesh!!)

Hope this helps.