I've been wanting to post one of these for a while
AMD 2800+
512 DDR 400
geforce 4 64 DDR
120 gig HDD

Although i have the following problems:
a) after long periods of using the mouse my keyboard cuts out
b) windows bluescreens if i use IDE 3 or 4 to boot from
c) sometimes my cpu gets up to 70 C

What cooler? What OS? What mouse and keyboard?
How much did you give for this?

c) Get yourself a case fan or two to increase the air flow in your computer.
b) How many hard drives have you got? If more than one you don't have any primary partitions on your slaves correct? Sometimes that screws up booting when using Windows 2000 or Windows XP.
a) Are you using ps2 or USB? If you are using SB you have installed the USB drivers for your motherboard right? Don't use the ones that come with Windows. The same goes for your IDE drivers.

Is that with the cooler that came with your CPU? If so, remount it because that is way outside acceptable. You might want to lap it or at least put a better thermal compound on it. AS for which compound is better than the AMD stock thermal pad, all of them barring nanotherm, which has its own special problems. Arctic Silver 3 or 5 is very good.

I'm guessing you have some sort of built in RAID controller right? Windows sometimes doesn't react very well to having the OS installed on one IDE controller, and then trying to boot it off a different one. Your RAID controller probably requires a totally different set of drivers then your normal IDE controller, and that may be confusing the heck out of windows (Are you getting the "INACCESSIBLE BOOT DEVICE" error?).

I'm using the HS fan that came with the processor, I agree it may be a problem with the thermal paste. I am using Win XP pro and a ps2 keyboard.
I have 2 HDDs but i would be happy to just get the system to boot from one, so i could use ide 1 and 2 for cdroms/zip etc (because you have to use ide 3 and 4 for harddrives only).
If i try to install win xp to ide 3 or 4 it says that i don't have a harddrive. When windows setup starts do i press F6 or something to "install 3rd party raid drivers"?
I built this myself

Hmmm... sounds like you've got a motherboard with two IDE channels, on each of which you can hang two devices. And if I understand you correctly, you're saying that you can boot fine and install fine off of one channel, but if you try to install something on the other channel, it fails.

If that's correct, do you have a master device on that second channel? One of the two devices must be jumpered as the master, and the other as a slave. Check the back of the drives for the proper jumpering.

In my experience (having built a few of my own machines), I haven't had any restriction on putting hard drives on one channel or the other. I now understand that you should keep similar devices on the same channel, because the channel moves at the speed of its slowest member. So put a hard drive and a CD-ROM on a channel, and they both pass data at the speed of the CD-ROM. You may have a different configuration, depending on your motherboard.

Good luck.

No I have 4 IDE channels and i can connect 2 devices from each (which means i can connect 8 IDE devices), just IDE 3 and 4 are use for harddrives only and i uant to use IDE 1 and 2 for cd roms (3 cd drives and a zip drive).
But my problem is that windows (XP pro SP1) runs fine from IDE 1 or 2 but not from IDE 3 or 4 thus limiting the ammount of drives i can have to 4.