Thank you for the suggestions, I have tried the majority of those, but those that I haven't I'll definately give a shot.  One thing I did forget to mention and I'm sure this is completly idiotic on my part, but this is the first time I've dealt with a CPU and sometimes I can be a moron.  Well anyway, when I took it out of the package I inspected it and noticed that some of the pins on one side of it were slightly bent which would make it unable to fit.  I had ordered it online and wanted to get the computer up and running ASAP so I just bent them back to make them fit and installed it anyway.  Could the nature of the problem I described be caused by a faulty CPU and could the CPU be faulty even if I was still able to run fdisk and format the HDD?

        The NOSPIN Group has added a new feature on our website,
           web based bulletinboard for questions and answers:
              Visit our sister website at http://nospin.com