I decided to give this system one more shot at booting up before having to trade her in. To my surprise, I was able to get into windows on the first attempt. I installed a newer version of Sandra and ran a couple of the benchmarks. Needless to say, the results seemed WAAY off base as Sandra had this Barc. setup ~400% slower than a dual Xeon 3220 system. I've got some SS of some other slightly less embarassing benches (but not by much) which I'll post later as I'm writing from my phone ATM.

OT: @ KTE and Lightman - my phone's a qtek9000 -> a rebadged HTC Universal powered by an Intel XScale 520Mhz cpu