On Thu, Oct 11, 2012 at 7:40 PM, Walt <waltsaw@gmail.com> wrote:

Take a close look at the capacitors on the motherboard. If they are bulging you can either replace them or the whole board.
Walt

On 10/11/2012 10:30 AM, John Stoffel wrote:

"Brett" == Brett Russ<bruss@alum.wpi.edu> writes:

Brett> Yes, I've done that several times. In fact, since my BIOS is
Brett> having issues preserving settings and shows the CMOS checksum
Brett> failure quite often, I usually have to revert to defaults just
Brett> to boot. This, despite a brand new CMOS battery. This is the
Brett> other symptom in my original email that I can't yet explain.
Brett> But, if it ends up being a motherboard HW issue, then anything
Brett> could go wrong including corrupted CMOS.

This points more to a low level hardware issue in the motherboard, or
possibly the CPU. Hard to know. If it's old enough, it might be time
to just replace it.

Just wanted to follow up with the group on the final resolution of this issue (I hope!). As I wrote earlier the new power supply didn't help.

I ended up buying a new motherboard, got it today, installed it tonight with the old power supply and all came right up w/o issues.

Interesting findings: when I took the CPU cooler off there was a big dead spider curled up amongst the power inductors surrounding the CPU. Also, there were a couple caps that were slightly "crowning", i.e. bulging a bit on top, when compared with some other identical ones on the board with the same capacity. So I figure either of these could be contributors, more likely the caps.

Now I have a nearly brand new Antec 450W power supply back in the box, for sale if anyone's interested.

Thanks all for the help,
Brett