Ok...I'm writing this on my computer, with Vista 32bit installed, no further problems, 8 or so hours of blue screen free computing.....ahhhhhh.....finally lol

So, now my theory (it remains a theory because I cheated, I bought a new mobo, a EVGA 790i SLI Ultra). After removing the ASUS Striker Extreme motherboard and installing the new EVGA board I had a problem, the computer wouldn't boot or even power on. So, I took everything out of the case, all extras stripped, so I had a bare mobo on the bench with just a power supply and a stick of RAM. I applied power and it passed its POST, so I installed the graphics card and HDD, connected the monitor and keyboard and tried again. It powered up fine.

Upon removal of the Thermaltake waterblock for the CPU, I noticed that the mounting bracket that sits on the back of the motherboard was being compressed against some protruding solder connections (for capacitors I think) and I think that these were piercing the protective insulation and shorting via this bracket. When I rebuilt my system I decided to leave this bracket out and just use plastic washers to fit the mounting screws for the waterblock. I suspect that this could have been the problem all along, mixed with some bad drivers for the ASUS board (If anyone has ever tried to get drivers from ASUS they would know how difficult it is to determine what drivers to use, let alone whether they are the latest ones or not).

Thanks to the great help from this forum, and to you Digerati for allowing me to bounce ideas around.

I think I will try to use this ASUS board again in the future as I now have a spare graphics card, power supply and RAM to go with it. My brother needs a new system, so he will get my hand-me-downs lol

For those of you about to build a system from scratch, please use this thread as a guide on how not to do it...lol

I am glad you got it going and it seems to be holding. Now you just have to keep it clean of malware, and heat trapping dust.

BTW, I am not a fan of alternative cooling solutions. For one, with the retail versions of the both AMD and Intel CPUs where a heatsink and fan assembly (HSF) are part of the retail package, the warranty is void if the CPU fails and you used other than the supplied HSF. Because the retail warranty is 3 years (1 year for OEM) and neither company want to replace a CPU, the supplied HSF are quality made, very good at cooling, and fairly quiet too.

That's the business side.

From a technical side, motherboard designers position critical heat producing components (regulator components, chipsets, etc.) near the CPU to take advantage of air flow produced by the HSF. Inexperienced alternative cooling users fail to consider the cooling needs of other sensitive devices and if lucky only end up with an unstable system.