Need help w/ diagnosis

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Im not sure where to begin.

I had a p4 2.4 with ic7-max 3 mobo, had two ata drives hooked up with 512k or pc3200 geil ram. I also ran an ati 9700 pro all in wonder. I decided it was time to upgrade and bought an ati x800 pro, one gig of geil ultra series ram 1 gb, and 2 sata drives.

Well to make a long story short, all this was going into another case but it turned out that cases power switch didnt work (i was mad) after two hours of moving stuff, i had to move it all back. When i fired it all back up, there was smoke, and apparently the power at the floppy had arced a wire and it melted the covering instantly. It was just an extension to the power supply so i thought maybe i was ok. I replaced the floppy and proceeded. All appeared well in the beginning. I set up the system to run in raid and for the first night all went well. Then things went wrong. I play counterstrike, and it was freezing in game, but allowing me access to the in game menus. It would reboot my computer as soon as i exited the game. It finally came to where it wouldnt let me boot into windows saying system32/drivers/pci.sys was missing or corrupt.

Well I then thought that maybe the video card or new ram was bad so I began testing with the old setup. I first put back in the old ram. Same problem. I then put back the old video card, same problem. I rehooked my old ata drive up and things actually worked which made me think it was one of the new hd's. Well that worked for a day and a half then it stopped working. (Nothing new was ever added to the old hd). Then i began thinking possible ps, so i went and bought a new ps, and still the same problem.

My question is after this entire segment,,,,, do you think I have a bad mobo, a bad chip,,, something else is wrong? I am at my wit's end here as I have no idea where to go. I have built many computers and never had a problem this bad and I dont know what to do next.
 
While moving the mobo around, you must have shorted it somewhere against the chassis, would be my first guess.
Take it all out again. Put the mobo on the antistatic bag it came in, put in only 1 stick of memory, cpu, keyboard and graphics card. Connect the PSU and fire it up.
Continue from there, adding piece by piece, until you find the culprit.
 
OK I guess my question then becomes,,, if I pull the whole thing out and hook up the barebones, and still run into the same problem, how do I know if its a chip or a mobo?
 
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