So I picked up a new CPU yesterday from a local shop I know and trust. It's an AMD Athlon X2 7750 (AM2+ socket, and an absolute rocket). I figured, why not - try the CPU since all of the other symptoms migrated between changing the motherboards, RAM, and hard drives, so the only thing really left are the CPU and Video Card (yeah, right... like a bad video card would be the problem).

I decided since I was going to be trying a new CPU that I'd swap back to the original ASUS M2N SLI-Deluxe mobo. Swapping it back in was no big deal... everything went fine. The ASUS board is quite a bit bigger than the MSI board, but there's plenty of room in the case.

I did some reading and discovered that in order to run the AM2+ CPU, I'd have to flash the BIOS to the 1701 version. No worries. That went quick and painless with the ASUS EZ Flash utility in the BIOS.

Fired it up and it ran through the XP setup fairly quick... until it made it to the '35 minutes to go - Installing Devices' section... then it seems to hang for some reason. I just found something in the BIOS that's Vista-specific when enabled... so I disabled it and turned off the SMART Hard Drive feature as well. Other than that, the RAM is timed properly (4-4-4-4-12) and everything should be good to go with the 'Auto' settings.

Beats me why this pile won't run right.