It's here....

[JustAGuy]

As to systems, I'm leaning towards an Athlon. A pair of Xeons or Opterons is a bit more than I wish to spend right now. Sad. I've not had a single CPU machine for many years.

Good luck with the testing. I have a feeling it will turn out to be the motherboard that has indeed crapped out on you.

As for your system; if you've gone so long with only dual/multi processor machines, may I suggest a P4 with Hyper Threading? The HT basically makes the P4 act as a multiprocesser machine. That's how it's recognized under Win XP, and you get pretty much the same benefit. It's worth looking into, if you're really going to be buying a single processor, yet yearn for multiple processors. I read something about Win XP Home not being able to make full use of the Hyper Threading, but XP Pro has no problems. Not 100% on that, though.

As I write this, I'm using Firefox for Linux on my Xbox :) Now that's a slow processor!