fifogigo

As far as the cpu fan turning off I tested on my own system one found there is a setting that can turn the cpu fan off. You may want to go to hardware monitoring and see if qfan speed control is enabled. (or at least that's what it is called on my asus board) and if it is enabled disable it.

It could be the motherboard but before you go replacing it you may want to remove everything from the computer, one part at a time making sure the power is completely off between changes, to see if you can at least get it to post, the tuner card could be part of the issue, but it could also be a ground fault. It may simply be that another card got damaged. If you want to go on the premise of it being the power supply they do sell inexpensive devices that will test that as well.

While you could just use the XP cd there's alot of hardware the xp cd will not find by itself, and those driverpacks although they are setup to let you slipstream them into a windows install nothing says you HAVE to use them for that.

You could always use 7zip or any other program to decompress those files and burn them to a dvd then just update the drivers and tell it to scan the disk and that should take care of a large amount of the hardware. Or do a slipstream in mode 1 with the quickstream cache, Basically that will compress the files so that it takes less space, and MAY fit on a cd.

Actually I have seen ECS and while it is ok as a cheap motherboard, but as the saying goes sometimes you do get what you pay for.

Personally I want a tyan multiprocessor board

I plan on it, i've been reading for a while, just never thought I had anything relevant to say. And this is one thing I am good at. PC repair that is.

From what you are saying it looks like you broke the zif socket in the beginning and after that broke some pins off the cpu. I would say at this point the motherboard and cpu are useless and while it should not have affected any other hardware it would depend on if anything shorted together.