I went over that mobo with a fine-toothed comb with the manual next to me, looking for anywhere that might be missing a jumper. In the end, the only place we could find that COULD have had a jumper was the frequency, and not having one only means it would be 166 MHz instead of 133. The fact that it was such an off colour made us suspicious, and the fact that we found other trash (snipped off end of a cable tie) in the case also made us believe that the loose jumper was an accident. So, trusting in this idea, we plugged it in and fired it up.
Fine. No worries. Worked slicker'n owl shit, to borrow a colloquialism.
You know, just having Dianna there helped my adrenaline response. Even though she is not a tech person in the slightest, just knowing someone else was there to confirm whether something I'd just reasoned out was complete bullshit or not was nice. I think all the time I spend alone makes it very hard for me to handle things like this, especially since I'm so loathe to ask for help on anything anyway. Anyway, I'm doing pretty good, and the machine is ready to go to
whiny_general's place in the morning. now the fun part will be this: the only way I was able to back up her stuff was by using GMail Drive...so 50+ MB of pictures, files, etc., is sitting in my GMail. Gotta pull it all down and put it back on her new machine. Yay fun. 