"I see nothing to confirm that ANY of it is good.
What's the cmos battery voltage?
How much noise/ripple on every one of the power supplies?
12/5/3.3/1.something "

This one, like alot of them now, will run without the battery. In fact it did when I first coaxed it into working. However I should check the PS. I kind of doubt it is the problem because of the pattern of failure and its young age. When I fired it up about a week ago it had been sitting for months. When it failed it was only off for a a matter of a couple hours. But I should of course find out for sure. I will check it before giving it the axe.

"I've resurrected several machines by replacing bad capacitors"

Believe it or not I hardly see any. A few small ones, but no bunches of them, like you would normally see around the processor. The few lytics I see are small, and none are bulging. Maybe they went with active filters after the regulators ? Knowing ECS, if a transistor and a small lytic is cheaper than a bunch of big lytics, they go with it. The only place a bunch of lytics could be hiding is under the heatsink/fan assembly. Hmm, I guess I should look.

"could mean bad RAM,
but it is more likely to be a bad connection in the RAM sockets. Clean
the RAM contacts with alcohol to eliminate this possibility. "

I suppose it won't hurt me to try cleaning the sockets. I wonder, just offhand, can I load slots 2 and 3 instead of 0 and 1 ? The reason I ask is that this thing is not that old and there is probably as much a chance of a socket being defective as it is dirty. The whole machine is pretty clean actually, it could have rolled off the assembly line yesterday from the looks of it.

"Reseat everything, especially the video card if it's not on the planar.
replace the clock battery with a known good one. "

Video is onboard.

Anyway, I think I am stuck just checking the PS because all the ones I have laying around don't have those extra pins on the main connector. Or will it run without those ? Or is there a way to just temporarily jump something in there ?

Actually there may be ONE PS I could try, I'll have to look. That PS has seen alot of use and more than average power drain because it had a bunch of harddrives in it. It's down to three right now but at one time it had five. Anyway, that one seems to fail to boot sometimes when it has sat for a time, which of course is probably filters. However now it runs continuously so maybe it would be a good enough test.

Whatever, if it fails the rest of this, I am taking a scrwwdriver to it. Anyone want to buy an E5700 and some RAM ?