Excellent, already going a million times better than at the computer forum. I'll get check some of these suggestions tonight, here's what I can answer so far:

How many drives, how many IDE channels and have you got the master/slave configuration correct?

There are three hard drives, one SATA and two IDE with SATA adapters slapped on the back of them (instructions for the adapter say set jumpers to master), the two IDEs have data on them, so I'm don't know if just plugging them in alone would--actually I don't know what I'm afraid of.

5) But you don't mention the bios beeping. If the video card isn't seated, then you should get beeping early in the boot.

I remember there were no beeps from the BIOS when I plugged in a little speaker.

I was told this could mean something devastating...wait a minute

6) See if your dinky little case speaker is connected to the motherboard - its a good diagnostic tool. You need to hear any BIOS beeps.

I just hooked up a speaker to the sound card. I'll make sure the case speaker was hooked up.

11) What's your Power Supply? A P4, and all but the oldest Athlons take a lot of juice. Plus, those CPUs load the +12V line - they used to run on the +5 line, and power supplies are still built off of the old design that pumps out a lot of +5. So you need a mofo of a Power Supply to run a modern CPU, more than one hard drive, and a decent video card. A Dual-Core CPU probably draws close to twice as much...

The power supply, thought I can't remember (nothing's in front of me at the moment

), from my understanding, is a real babe, but you're suggesting 500-600 watt power, and if I remember it's only like 400 so maybe it is starved for power, but the guy who found it for me was real proud of it (yeah, didn't do my own shopping

, but my go-to guy's good with this)

Wow this is a tremendous step up from where I was, thank you and I'll update progress tonight.