thank you for your possible solution I will try it now, for the record the existing memory I had was two 256MB PC3200's, not really enough ram for my taste.

I will give this a try but I had assumed after seeing my OS the way it was that just simply putting the card in by itself would not resolve the issue, I will try this anyway though.

And yes I did have the power cable unplugged, Ram poisoning huh? Never heard of that before.

Would the problem still persist if even the original cards (not the new ram) were the only ones remaining?