[Sever]

Bozos, the guy who 'fixed' it is the local computer nut and he's not interested in the money. He upgraded the system from a p4 a few years ago and has helped us with several issues since. After installing the new mboard, his first action was to try and recover a usable restore point using a windows mirror program. For some reason (i still don't know and i was watching him do it) it became necessary to reinstall xp. He was unaware that i'd formatted about 8 months ago and put xp pro on the system. By the time i realised what he was doing, it was too late. He's all apolagetic and stuff, but i'm still a bit annoyed.

AFAIK, the bios chip itself is fried, which is why the automatic bios restore from the hard drive didn't work.