As it turned out, it was a good thing that I'd brought my old (toasted) motherboard up with me when I took this to MiComp for them to see what was not quite working, as it appears that the CPU on the other system (which, as you may recall, was hanging by its fan cord when it arrived) seems to have been defective, so the guys up at MiComp just swapped out that for my old CPU and everything worked fine! So, I guess I ended up paying $71.00 for a new motherboard, as that seems to be the only part that ended up being actually used (I do have a "spare" DVD drive, CD/RW drive, and 3.25" floppy drive out of the deal, however). The "bench" charge for swapping the CPU and making sure everything was working was just $45.00, so all-in-all (counting the new PS that I bought last Tuesday) is just about $160.00 ... about 1/3 of what I would have ended up shelling out for a new system, but still a good deal in that I get to actually use all the bits and pieces I've been adding over the past few months (the gig of RAM, the SecondLife-capable video card, and the new PS).
Once I get caught up with the 500+ pieces of e-mail that had accumulated while I wasn't able to talk to btripp.com, I'm going to pull out that USB external HD that's been sitting around here and start this puppy into a full back-up! The very first thing I did was grab my 7-page Word file with all my passwords, etc. and dump that onto a floppy ... my biggest nightmare was the thought of having to dig up all that stuff!
Anyway ... I'm baaaaack!