Thor's words to live by . . .
but in this time it was a case of the cheap Taiwanese capacitors. Someplace on these boards I read about capacitors that swell or explode on the mobo. That was the problem. Swapped the cpu, worked fine, different cpu in that mobo, no worky worky. Noticed 4 swollen capacitors. Funny thing, the other 6 boards I got at the same time haven't failed yet, no swelling. And almost came off the assembly line at the same time, mac addresses with one or two digits off for the whole lot of them. Weird.
Next thing to do, though, is get a 5 gal propane bottle and convert to to portable air blaster.