Greetings Listers,
Thank you to all that reponded, both on and off the list. Seems that the trusty Logitech PS 2 mouse was the culprit of NO MOUSE.
Bob, For whatever reason, I didn't put 2 and 2 together as this was my "test bench" mouse and has been plugged into many machines. I dug out a M$ PS2 mouse and it worked. I use an M$ optical track ball on my PC. Could you or someone explain how this was "shorting the board" ... fan slowing and spontaneous reboot? I also went thru the bios and the only mouse designator was for a USB mouse. Now for part 2. And Ian, you may have something here.  The modem installed fine and I put her on line and did all the windows updating for Me. The pc is running fine  Except when I installed the nic I found that the floppy drive has gone loco. It tells me that the disk is unformatted and would I like to. Pulled out several known good floppies and got the same error. I decided to let it try to format one and it said the disk was incompatible because it wanted to format at (are you ready for this) 180 Kb. I haven't seen the likes of this since the first IBM PC in late 1981. All of these components are brand new with everything coming from Tiger Direct except the Vid card. This is the same floppy drive that 4 days ago started the pc several times before windows was installed. 
One other thing that I have never seen on a desktop. The drive in "My Computer" is listed as "Removeable drive A"
I notice no action on boot and even with a disk it goes right to C and boots windows. The bios is set to 1-A  2-IDE 0 and 3-Cdrom.
I am confused.  In the early days, I had the minor problems of memory not fully seated or a card not  all the way in the slot and those were quickly found. I chalked 'em up to a learning experience, but this PC is apparently haunted.
Stephen Hager
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