Glad you found the culprit! MBs seem to be getting cheaper and cheaper nowdays I swear. My mobo fried because some jerk at Emachines thought that overtighning the cpu heatsink clamps was a good idea. I found out that it was tightened so much that it warped my MB and some of the resistors fried.

Tis the bane of using refurbished although hubby just got a new set up and is already having hardware issues. Asus says "its just the way that board is" and I'm all "you put out bad hardware on purpose?!?" Sigh...