Update - Managed to get PC B to boot on One stick or RAM after clearing CMOS overnight - ran Memtest86 - failed on pass2 .. getting somewhere ... out of interest tried the other stick in and PC would not even boot (lucky I picked the other one to try first) - weird in that one of the sticks is "so bad" it wont allow a boot and the other has Mem errors - any way no need to spend time on that - RMA'd

Back to PC A ... Random instability resulting in reboot. In the cold light of a new day, remembered that std XP config has the Advanced > Settings > Automatic restart set to on as standard (been so long since i chased an XP instability problem) - so set it off and of course could now get BSODs finally some debug info to work with .. found out it was always classpnp.sys .. digging around everything indicates usually a disk caching or disk problems tried turning off write caching on all disk .. didn't help ... so searched again.. as wazoo99 says its half the fun ... found this article

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...d.php?t=131966

WHY OH WHY IS IT NOT A STICKY

Thanks Exo .. I had (maybe in ignorance) set the SATA interfaces in BIOS to be IDE, so decided to changed to AHCI and reinstall XP (yet) again...touching wood .. here we go again

As Asus web site was on a go slow I could not get the Audio drivers so disabled the onboard audio in BIOS and followed the rest of the instructions .. Plan was to do the Audio drivers later ... loaded up a bunch of software and ran all day crash free... hmmm maybes maybes we are out of the woods

Finally got Asus Audio drivers .. enabled Audio in Bios .. booted loaded drivers .. rebooted and damm thing wont boot to desktop - crashes and reloads half way thru windows load ARGHHH .. F8 safe mode - remove Audio drivers, disable Audio in BIOS

Tried a Creative X-Fi Xtreme Audio 7.1 Soundcard I had spare (which I know works as it came out of another functional machine) and Damm things wont even get all the way to windows desktop so I can load drivers ..

So Audio :-) How do I get it working ??? All I need on this machine is a single Audio feed out to a Pair of Harmon Kardom Sticks and Bass unit, just plain stereo .. nothing fancy AT all

Help much appreciated