I'm having to post this using the wife's PC, as mine's just hung  

Its an ASUS motherboard that a friend gave to me for free, because his SPDIF audio out stopped working. Its worked fine for me for over a year, until 2 weeks ago when the headphone audio out stopped working.

Then yesterday, I shutdown linux and tried restoring my Windoze XP partition, and it looked like I didn't have the drivers for the onboard 10/100 network port. However, when I booted back into linux I noticed that it was because the network port was dead. (It came back to life for an hour just now, but as my home directory is NFS mounted its hung the PC when it died 10mins ago)

I've already bought a new audio card for £4, and I could spend another £4 on a network card, but is this indicative of a more serious problem?  

Can someone with a bit more experience of ASUS motherboard hardware problems let me know what to expect next? or is that something only a clairvoyant would know? (If you need model numbers, I can get them after I've rebooted, but I wanna give it a chance to recover first)At the moment it seems like it could be a lot of things, none of them good though. ASUS are not renowned for there mother boards being error free though. I bought three in a ROW trying to get one that worked, and all of them had the same problem - it would not detect that it was supplying power to the CPU fan, and as such would not let you start the computer up for more than 5 seconds, even though the fan was getting all the power it needed.If you got it for free then you got your money's worth.  Got a point there.To me it doesn't sound like a hardware issue at all ...sounds like both your Linux and Windows installs are FUBARED...Linux is very stable compared to Windoze, so its unlikely to be fubar.
Windoze has just been installed from CD, its XP PRO SP2.

Anyway I've just installed a wifi USB adaptor, and it worked for 3hrs before hanging again. Then, after hitting the reset button my BIOS said that there was no IDE master  

I guess that the motherboard is the common FACTOR in all these faults: onboard SPDIF audio, onboard headphone audio, onboard 10/100 network, primary IDE bus

Can anyone recommend a reliable and COST effective motherboard for use with an AMD Athlon 64 CPU, a Radeon All-In-Wonder TV/graphics card, and ordinary 160Gb IDE HDDs?Google got me to the mothership in .37 seconds!

http://www2.amd.com/us-en/Processors/DevelopWithAMD/1,,30_2252_869_9460%5E9461,00.htmlMan their gettin fast lately...

 I'm SURE it's because I use Firefox.   Quote

I'm sure it's because I use Firefox.  

http://www2.amd.com/us-en/Processors/DevelopWithAMD/1,,30_2252_869_9460%5E9461,00.html