Thanks much for your reply, Lewis.  I haven't kept up with the RCs beyond #5, but I will soon.  In the meantime, I have a more immediate problem.  (This veers well OT, but with your indulgence I thought I might draw upon the wisdom to be found here.)  I've been intending to make Shuttle XPC #2 (AMD 6400 dual core, 4 meg.s Ram, a 9800 GT video card) my 'Go To' machine, replacing an older single-core P4 based Shuttle.  But it is down for the count just now.  I had been having some problems booting -- nothing coming up on the monitor -- and at first I was thinking in terms of some video issue, either with the video card or the monitor.  But now I am thinking it is neither.  When I tried to boot it up last night, I briefly got a static screen from the BIOS that mentioned a CMOS checksum error, and going into "Safe Mode." Note that this is pre-OS, so we're _not_ talking about the Safe Mode of Windoze.  Attempts to boot it up again have not been successful.

Electrical is still happening, so it's probably not the power supply (?).  My first thought is towards something heat related. I notice that the fan noise seems to be less than half of its normal volume.  I will check the fan situation, but would welcome other troubleshooting suggestions, particularly from anyone familiar with the Shuttle line of small form factor computers.   

I was about to slap one of those NIC cards in and move on to the wireless stuff, re the Linksys router, but this is going to be on hold for awhile (at least for this computer) until I get this problem ironed out.