Let's see, where were we...

Well, the hamsters are running, and well (knock on wood), inside the Solomonia technical plant...

Many disagree, but I recommend a clean OS re-install every so often to keep things running up to snuff. It really takes care of all those little nagging issues, like odd hangs or crashes and shut-down issues.

In this case I was swapping out a motherboard, so there wasn't much choice anyway, and this required that pretty much everything come out of the case...

...which provides a good opportunity to get into all those nooks and crannies to vacuum out all that dust (and sometimes cob webs) that accumulates in there. I must give props to the folks at Antec for the P-180, in spite of all the fans moving air through that thing, there was surprisingly little dust accumulated inside -- it had mostly gotten caught up in the filters on the front, and the P-180 is a very nicely designed, quiet case.

A few tips for OS reinstallation:

1) Resign yourself. There will be something you forgot to back up.
2) I keep all my mail folders and temp files (My Documents, etc...) on one drive partition, making this easy to back up to a different physical hard drive (there are three in my case), so they can be moved back in if you overwrite them by accident. My C: drive is only for Windows, D: for applications, E: for games, F: for temp files like My Docs, email, etc.. The two other physical drives I use for storage, downloads, video editing...that kind of thing, but no apps run off of them.
3) Don't forget your bookmarks.
4) Your wife will be upset that something wasn't put back just exactly as it was before, and will blame anything that looks different on something you did, even if it had nothing to do with anything you did. Expect this.

Oh, and do unplug the power cord when making any hardware changes. Turning off the power is not enough. There is still a small current running (according to the little light that stays on on my new board) -- it won't hurt you, but it could have an effect on your components, and changing a motherboard is something we only want to do VERY occasionally. Pooched out components are annoying (and costly).

Yes, I installed XP. I'm holding off on Vista until it acquires a tad more maturity.