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Alright. Here's the update. After I got the new motherboard, I did a complete wipe and reformat of my harddrive, and a fresh install of windows xp. It is up and running now, and so far, stable. I tried doing a repair install before, and along with a bad motherboard, that was a mistake. Now, however, it's working fine. Also , I contacted microsoft, and they referred me to dell. I gave dell my product key and sticker information, and explained it to them. I guess OEM means transferrable , because they happily helped me reactivate my windows copy and wished me luck with the new pc.

Thanks so much for your help guys, I learned a lot out of this and Im confident I can put together a pc from scratch and get it up now. You can mark this as resolved.

Very good news on all fronts...
You got your PC all fixed
We found out that an OEM OS is not a financial/social pariah.
Repair installs often work just fine for the issues that cannot be fixed inother ways... but the hardware MUST be identical for it to work correctly as far as I know.

Thank you for letting everyone benefit from your experience and teaching us all something new... by posting your final results.