Hello fellow PC aficionados!

I just built up a budget home system for the significant other...

Gigabyte K8NS Socket 754, AMD 3000+ Sempron
GeForce 6200 AGP 8x 256MB
SoundBlaster Audigy ZS
Lucent QuadraBus 4 port USB controller
Saitek X45 flight controller
Seagate 160GB Ultra ATA 100 HD
DDR 400 1 GB DIMM

BIOS setup was pretty straightforward, disabled AC97 on-board sound for the Sound Blaster. No on-board video, so GeForce went right in. It's running off of a 430W power supply.

Bought the Windows XP Pro SP2 under a licensing agreement from the University... and then I installed the Yahoo! DSL software so it could talk with the DSL modem in the house. Upon reboot... icons come up, apps load.. and then icons and taskbar disappear. Explorer.exe isn't on the list of processes running. Trying to "Run..." it doesn't work via the Task Manager - which I still have access to, however.

Norton Antivirus 2006 and SpySweeper are on, as well as Windows FireWall. Also tried it without SpySweeper just in case the two weren't compatible... still no joy in Mudville.

This sux. And I KNOW it's got to be due to something obvious to someone else that I'm doing wrong... all the software on it was compatible with my P.O.S. old HP Pavilion running XP Home SP2.

Memory stick is good, wore my ESD strap when installing it grounded to the chassis...

I have all the IRQs on the PCI slots set to auto... BIOS detected processor and hard drive just fine as well as RAM type.

It crashed similarly with my trusty old Radeon 9000 Pro installed... which was a 2x/4x card. Suspecting it as the culprit, I switched to the GeForce, slapping my head thinking that the nVidia nForce3 250 chipset wasn't compatible with an ATI card... but still the same results.

I are stumped. ;-) Any help is appreciated fellas.

D'oh - sorry folks... edited und posted twice... darn it all...

Thanks! (This message of course has a duplicate post...)