Looks like for me, it was a true hardware problem. There was some kind of a memory problem. It turned out that I could not even install windows without running into weird problems. I forget what indicated it, but I finally removed one of the memory sticks and things started working - sort of. Still couldn''t get the penguin to load, but I did manage to get windows going. Nevertheless, there were so many problems that I finally gave up and put the box in the recycle bin. It was only going to be a distro test box anyway.