So it turns out my motherboard has another obscure glitch - if you have a dual-core CPU and you plug in an external USB drive and copy over lots of stuff, it locks up. This took me a long time to track down, because only very rarely do I ever do that.

I finally found it out on Jan 2nd, and shortly after found out that the manufacturer (Abit) had gone bankrupt a few months ago and closed its doors for good on Dec 30th. So driver fixes are never coming. The latest firmware version is from 2005. It's the one I installed back in 2005.

So then I ordered a PCI USB card as a workaround. It came in today. This is when I first discovered that none of the PCI slots on my mobo actually work.

Sigh.