but it won't teach us what went wrong and why the problem happened. But right now, that doesn't seem to be an issue anymore as to what exactly happened as she is ordering a new system with XP. New parts, a new OS, and hopefully the problem will go away. If not, she'll be back here making more posts about it.
I heard stories where people stripped the parts, and then reset the CMOS settings on the motherboard to factory defaults and never had a problem with that hardware again and were able to use it elsewhere. It also could be a bad combination of motherboard and power supply, as you said previously.
But you are correct, stripping out the parts and replacing them with new ones solves the problems most times. So does reformatting the hard drive and reinstalling the OS in some cases. That is the quickest way of solving a problem rather that investigate everything and spend hours or days trying to figure out what went wrong. I wrote off the hardware I was using for the Linux install as bad, and as soon as I can replace it, I will try to install Linux again.