[Captain Kwok]

Yeah, that's what I'm going to do when I get the chance tonight is get an updated bios driver.

The motherboard is Asus (can't recall the model right now, will note it on next startup). I've given the rest of the pertinent specs in my first post.

I installed WinXP fresh on the computer when it was new, and also Norton. There are reports of a norton driver causing problems, although my symptons haven't quite matched up to what I read.

I don't think it's connected to software remnants, since it has been present since the earliest days, when the system was more or less "clean" and the error occurs very randomally...

I do run ad-aware on a regular basis.