All, I'll try to address everyone's responses at once. In short, it's nothing to do with the OS because the problem is quite simply a failure for the BIOS to complete POST, and quite often at that. As I mentioned I've already repro'd the problem with everything (which means a video card and all SATA devices and all USB devices b/c everything else is onboard) unplugged. This is why I suspect the HW. The next step is, as someone suggested, monitoring motherboard LEDs, although I haven't seen much here yet. There is no beep pattern when things fail. There is, apparently, a beep at end of POST, which I don't hear when the problem repro's, which indicates to me that I'm stuck in POST somewhere. I will double check later tonight the completely bare motherboard (with CPU and at least one DIMM, of course) to see if I can repro again in this state. I'll check for any LEDs and flashing patterns. Lastly, I'll manually disable through BIOS menu as many devices as I can and hope that the settings stick across reboot (I'd mentioned some problems in this department in my original email). Even then I'm not sure if the BIOS will still include these devices in POST (I'd expect it might) and then just disable them before proceeding to boot the OS. Thanks for the help all! Brett