CA> Apparently a bad contact with the memory stick but while I was
 CA> there I decided to 'dust' the CPU heatsink and discovered
 CA> there is no paste between the heatsink and CPU - not good.

be careful, there... some CPUs are designed to be seated with their
heatsinks without any heatsink compound... adding compound can (and has)
caused problems by insulating the chip too much from the heatsink... not
knowing what you've got, its hard to say more...

 CA> Somehow introduced another temporary short and in the process
 CA> of unplugging all the drives to test for boot W2K removed all
 CA> the drivers. :-\ W2K is aggressive about 'maintaining' itself
 CA> more than I care for.

in many ways, that's a good thing... this is/was a problem that w9x and
such have... they'd add or move stuff but not remove it... not removing
things stuffed the registry up and led to confusion in the OS... removing
them manually generally helps things a lot... knowing what to remove is
something that m$ can't even teach as each one is different...

 CA> So .... for some reason it wouldn't see the floppy on A: and
 CA> after several uninstalls of the 'device' and so on and so on I
 CA> finally got it all working again. Odd thing is it seems faster
 CA> now. Go figure?

SOP >

)\/(ark