I have the same mobo, or a variant, IIRC, and the chipset, but not the SATA. My computer is stock HP Pavilion 735n (http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/d...name=c00005300) with an extra HD, Athlon XP, 512MB.

I didn't think about sound as a whole - I'll have to test that, but at least the startup and shutdown sound file were missing with 2.6, irrespective of cheatcodes. The mouse problems were worse with 2.6 than 2.4, but didn't get really bad until I added the persistent home (last night was the first time I used it, and it worked great with 2.4)