At last i listened to my 15 year old son and canned my asus a7s333 mobo. He found a biostar---something for me, with an Nvidia chipset. so far i have not seen a single "bug" from the long list i had identified before. I have even "upgraded" to 9.0 and my vmware is rock solid. i have not tried the 166 kernel yet and i have not tried the 3d drivers yet, i am just enjoying the stability for a while:)) the asus board is still being used in the house. as long as there is no scsi card on it and as long as only one ide channel is used, it can run xp ok. the hardware problem was not a mobo specific problem. i had tried 3 different boards, under warrantee. after the third time i tried to trade it in for another asus mobo (i would pay the difference), asus refused. no more asus anything for me. Dimitris