EMachine t5026 cd drives inop,lan inop, freezes when primary ide channel is enabled

So I have a T5026 emachine that was my mother in laws thats been sitting for years.... I did a recovery of the winxp partition of the sata drive and did a clean install of windows xp. At the first startup of XP the waiting bar goes 3/4 way through _____==__ and freezes. so I went into bios and disabled the primary IDE channel (before alot of trial and error of course pulling out PCI cards ect) seems that the cd drives are unresponsive to eject button plugged in to port or not,will not eject also the onboard lan, has drivers installed and seems to be operating as designed until I plug in the cat5 cord to my router which still gives me a "no cable plugged in" I have tried lowering speeds ect no responce from the lan what so ever. everything else works great when ide primary channel is disabled. I have tried to enable the port without any devices plugged in it still freezes and will not boot until I plug cd drives in and disable port (won't work with cd drives unplugged and port disabled) *weird* I am thinking a possible bad PSU or even motherboard. what do you guys think....
 
If the actual recovery discs for the machine were never burned, you can find them somewhere in "all programs". These may be different than the XP partition, which is only (????) a repair install. (IDK if all the drivers are in the partition. They might be).

I don't think the machine would boot with one section of the PSU out.

The T-5026 has an Intel branded mobo, and it will accept most Intel offered "Value added software".
You can get anything you need for this board /CPU combo directly from Intel's site, EXCEPT for the eMachines recovery disc image.

If you feel the need to check out the PSU, (those Bestecs are indeed turds), download "Intel desktop utilities lite" from Intel, and install that.

Inspect around the CPU VRM for signs of burned capacitors, if you haven't already done so.
 
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