Jim (25 Sep, 2004 12:25):
I just wanted to follow up with you folks. I finally tracked the problem down. It turns out that I have a motherboard with defective capacitors. It seems that there are quite a few of these out there. This site outlines the problem pretty well, and it isn't limited to IBM hardware. My software vendor put me on to this.
http://www.stalphonsos.com/~chad/exploding_caps.html
Unfortunately, my warranty on these boxes expired in April of this year. Thanks for everyones help on this.
Thanks for pointing this out. I have an Elitegroup mainboard which had been crashing with random lockups and such. Its been sitting in the closet as I'd given up trying to figure out its problem. I just checked it - sure enough there are 2 caps which show similar symptoms.
Fahrvenugen