How embarassing!
This whole episode turned out to be a "dustbunny" in some of the exposed pins on a GeForce2GTS card.
I let an expert friend of mine listen to the beeps on boot over the phone and he said "swap in another video card and see what happens".
It booted right away.
I looked at my trusty old GeF2 card to see if it had toasted itself and I saw a bunch of dust between a double row of exposed pins on the card. So I did a good clean up on the card and the computer.
Just for fun I swapped the old card back in and added all the RAM, including the one I thought was bad.
It booted just fine.
However, in all the thrashing, some Windoze files got trashed and I had an FAT error that Scandisk could not fix.
Fortunately I have nothing important on that HD but Games.
Dustbunnies. I'll be more careful in the future.
