Ok, my NEW PERL was just about to drive me nuts after I tried in vain for a week to determine what was causing it to restart EVERY TIME instead of shutdown like I asked it to. I scoured the net to no avail. I thought perhaps my in-place repair install of XP Pro was somehow to blame, but I did NOT want to reformat/reinstall 98SE, XP Pro (fully loaded), XP Pro(audio only) in my multi-boot (System Commander)'puter 'cause the system was so finely tuned before my P4T-E *seemingly* failed. (Yes, the new system still did exactly what the Asus did - failed to POST, but only a total of 3 times and is now working consistently - bad CPU??) WTF over? Anybody got a spare Northwood to loan me?
So for any of you with a PP412X Antec power supply (and some others, according to Intel 5 min ago), you *may* need to flash to BIOS version P19, which thankfully fixed my shutdown trouble. P21 was a no-go for me.
It's working great now and has not re-exhibited the no POST anomaly. Too bad my nice fast ram has to run at 266MhZ - til I get a new processor anywho.