Well, the computer sunk to the point of no boot, so replaced the MB. Looking at the old MB, I think the problem were some bad caps going south in the power supply. The tops were mushrooming out like blown caps do. Up running again, after the reformat and clean install, so will have to warm everything up and see how it does. I appreciate all of the suggestions from everybody, and hopefully it is fixed now :)Den

Hope everything works ok. The only time I ever saw electrolytics swell and foam was when lightening struck my test bench. This blue flash of lightening went across the steam pipes before it entered the test bench.After the flash, the meter on this one piece of equipment was oscillating like a drunk sailor! I replaced the spike circuit components and the unit seemed to work ok. However, over a period of weeks and months, I continued to find capacitors swelling and foaming like a battery terminal.I eventually wholesale replaced every capacitor.

So far, everything OK. Perhaps it was a bad run of caps that have been going down hill for some time. The board, a Shuttle, didn't take any voltage spikes, but the caps that were swelling are over close to the cpu heatsink. This new board, a QDI appears to have a better layout in some respects, though who knows if cpu heatsink had anything to do with the caps demise. I added a fan over in that area, and left one of the slot covers open so the air can circulate a bit better over near the cpu area. The same capacitors on the new board are placed near the air intake vents of the power supply fan, so they should run cooler. It's the first time I have ever had any components fail on a motherboard, except the CMOS battery :)Den