Ok, newest info: (again sorry bout double posting, but it's the only way to bump up nowadays)

1. No evident hardware damage. No smell of magic smoke, no sweaty caps, nada. Everything looks fine.

2. Re-reinstalled windows with high level format, no issues encountered during reinstall.

3. got through runonce, then the machine rebooted due to driver issue (fitting, it wasn't installed yet...)

4. booted to safemode and installed nvidia drivers from cd. (halted the reboot issues)

5. rebooted to normal windows and installed the mobo drivers, ports, lan, etc from my handy mobo cd.

6. had reboot issues due to video drivers (fitting, something in the mobo drivers must be conflicting with the nvidia drivers.)

7. booted to normal windows again and reinstalled nvidia drivers.

8. rebooted to normal windows again, waited through the 'found new hardware' 'printer install failed' bs yet again. Went online with MSIE and snagged down the latest drivers for z22 from Lexmark (for winXP specific). Unzipped them to their own directory per their instructions, attempted install of printer - FAILED. Grr.

I've not even begun to screw with the soundblaster yet, thinking that if it's fuxored at just the printer, I need to fix it first yesh?

So here's where we stand:

Virgin Winblows install - Yes, I'm putting up with the popups to say it's effing virgin, although I'm pretty sure I'll halt messenger and remove windows messenger from the mix before it's over with.

XP is sitting happily at service pack 1 with zero updates as of yet. (SP1 being as far back as I can go.. my OEM XP has sp1 onboard.)

What next?