Just a quick follow-up. I'm still hoping that my original distress has been solved. However, I get a lot of lockups from MSIE that I never used to get. I can usually shut MSIE down with the Task Manager, but it can be troublesome when completing a transaction.
During the interim, I had lost all ability to see or access my DVD burners. I tried many things including removing the IDE channels. Satisfied myself that the drives were OK in another machine and finally reinstalled the PCI add-on card for the PATA DVD burners. That worked as far as being able to see and control them, but have no idea why the MB PATA connector didn't exist to Windows. (BIOS saw and identified the drives OK.)
I'll mark this topic as solved, but if anyone can suggest reasons for these anomalies, I'd sure appreciate it.
Thanks all