Thanks for the help Zeus - she is up and running now!

I went through your list and threw in a few other things along the way... I got down to the next to the last bullet in my clip of tricks before the dreaded RMA. I reseated the E8600 (then was going to try my QX6850) - and that did it. So I put it all back together again and am typing this on it now!

Have flashed both bios to 0601 and will start playing as soon as I'm done updating drivers, formatting HDD, etc.

Thanks again - more to come!