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Eureka!
Thank you all for the help.
So here's the deal- my motherboard said it could support PC2-3200 and PC2-4200. The RAM I bought was PC-5300, but it claimed to be backwards compatible. Either it wasn't, or it was just bad ram (hard to believe BOTH sticks were bad though).
The solution was to exchange for two 1-gig sticks of PC2-4200 (this time brand is Corsair). Snapped them in, booted, and perfect.
The downside is that the 2 512 sticks are PC2-3200, which means they all run that way (I lose out on some speed). How much better would it be to upgrade the old ones too?
Anyhow, the difference is quite pronounced while gaming. The combination of a real video card and 2 more gigs of ram really pulled things together nicely.
As for the booting issue, for whatever reason the BIOS decided to start looking for a floppy drive on booting. I have never had a floppy drive. Anyhow, disabled that and for the moment it is smooth sailing.
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