Well,

She's up and going again, after being out for about a month and a half.  I wish I could say I knew the exact reason for it operating as it did.  But I am clueless, and still a bit frustrated.

I bought no new hardware.  Since my initial post, I've changed my place of residence.  The computer had been sitting in the corner with other boxes since my move in late July.  I had nearly tossed it, glad I did not.  A friend came over one night and asked about it.  I explained the entire story, and he showed interest in checking it out.  He knew no more about it than I, but being the nice guy that he was, said he'd mess with it for awhile since I showed complete disinterest.

With the new MX2200 card installed, he was never able to get anywhere.  He tried booting up with the harddrive unplugged, in order to allow the Windows Restore CD to initialize, and than plugging it back in, but the computer would always report, at some point or another "Hard Drive not Found".  A few times the computer would shut of completely, and not power back up.  I later realized this was a protective feature.  We had the computer opened up and I'm sure one of the fans wasn't cooling something that it ought to be.

Later that week, I myself sat down for an hour to toil with it.  No luck. I decided to put the old TNT2 Pro card back in.  After installing, I powered the computer up.  To my surprise it started to show the Windows boot from CD message.  Not wanting to wait and see if the problem magically fixed itself, I opted to boot from the CD and repartition...wipe everything.  I still, at this point, figured the computer would error out on me at any given moment.  

Windows began to reinstall, and I knew this was big.  At 8%, however, the computer completely shut off.  This is when I realized something inside was overheating (as stated above).  I waited awhile, brought out a fan, and tried again.  Success!

She's back up and running quietly, for a 2000 model at least.  I have no problems with any of the hardware, and it never struggles on restarts or shutdowns.  Don't know what to say.  

Just wanted to give one final thank you to all that followed this.  I read through each message posted and took into account everything that was suggested. Feel free to repost or e-mail me  :)

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