Ron,
I'm going to start by telling you that I truly appreciate your dogged efforts to help this PC. I have a decent level of computer knowledge (built/upgraded/repaired MANY PCs until about 10 years ago) but this one has gone over the line as far as responding to my various tricks.
The chipset drivers didn't do anything productive. Still not booting into windows. I can't uninstall the video drivers because it keeps telling me that it fails driver detection or something similar. I got so frustrated that I shut the computer down before writing down the error..stupid mistake. On the bright side, it should be HIGHLY reproducible tomorrow. :D
Installing Windows over would require going out and spending 200 for a full copy of Win7 because the only disk I have is the original Vista stuff and then the upgrade from Vista to 7. I have my doubts that it's even going to work since I can't execute the repair program from either the recovery partition or the original CDs. Each time it tries to load a windows type environment to proceed with the install it crashes. Frustrating.
As I look at the potential costs to buy what I need to do more upgrades and/or repairs (like a new MB...$500??) it might make more sense to just call it quits and buy a new machine then scavenge the old HDD over and transfer my files.
Right now it's just causing me to scratch my head.