After reading a couple of things about how changing some settings wouldn't kill anything, I decided to fiddle around. I was running 512M of Corsair at 333 for months with no problems. Tonight, I changed the settings to Ultra from Normal and the command rate to 1T from 2T. Tried to boot, big kernel panic, hit the restart button, and went back into the bios.

I changed the two settings back to what they were, tried to boot, big kernel panic. Tried booting into Windows a couple of times, and got alternating blue screens and instant reboots.

Ran Memtest-86 a few times. I get errors when the ram's set to 333, and none when it's at 266. CAS doesn't seem to matter (tried both 2 and 2.5). At 266, it seems stable (I'm writing this from the system), but obviously something's fried.

Could it be anything other than the ram? I'm praying it's not the board, since I just went through a giant hassle getting it replaced (exploding capacitors), whereas the ram is from a company that'll exchange it no questions asked.

Thoughts? Need more info? Want me to try more stuff?

I'd try a bios reset

That did it! No idea why, but everything's back to normal. Many thanks.