Hi,

Ok,

I tried booting into safe mode. It took a really really really long time --
longer than I recall on other machines, however I don't recall doing that
before on this one, and the boot up on this machine, with the Via RAID
enabled, has never been fast. Safe mode is weird in the best of
circumstances so it is hard to know whether what I observed was normal. As
to the disk access problem, it was definitely much improved over regular
mode. There was some delay each time I changed from one drive to another
drive, but subsequent accesses on the same drive were relatively normal.

Going back into regular mode, now, the problem has recurred. Let me be a
bit more specific about the problem. It seems as though I can "explode" the
directory/file tree in Windows Explorer (Windows 2000) normally most of the
time. The problem is when I right click to open a dialog box on a file or
directory, and sometimes, when I double click on a file to open it or start
a program. The system will wait a ridiculous amount of time, maybe 20
seconds or more, sometimes, before the dialog box comes up; occasionally
windows explorer or the other process crashes while it is waiting. It is as
if Windows Explorer has no trouble giving a list of files and directories in
a drive, but if I want to open them or copy them or whatever, the system
then has difficulty locating the specific file in order to act upon it.

Use of the internet and email appears to be normal. A few programs do not
work most of the time in either safe mode or regular mode -- an example is
the free Microsoft Photo editor program which is my default program when I
click on a jpg.

Other programs work completely normally, like Nero and Nero Express; I've
burned a CDR with no problems this morning.

I have confirmed that 1012 is the currently loaded Bios, so the reflashes
apparently worked although perhaps the CMOS is stuck in some way I don't
understand.

Once again, the system was working fine, no problems at all, until a few
hours after I flashed the new bios 1014 onto the box. Sometimes the
problems seem to go away, like this morning after the machine sat all night
downloading a file. Right now, after these various maneuvers (safe mode x2,
loading bios defaults) the problems are back. At first I thought maybe the
new SATA drive was the culprit but last night I switched back to the old ide
drive and disconnected the SATA drive and there was no difference.

I don't really know what else to do except trying to remove the cmos battery
and short the jumpers but I'm not really sure at all whether that is worth
doing or will accomplish anything.

Suggestions, advice, personal counselling :-) are all welcome.

TIA.

Ken