Dead 9800 XT?

(Also posted in the ATI newsgroup).

I recently replaced a dead motherboard in my system. Prior to the
motherboard dying, my Radeon 9800XT had been working fine. After replacing
the motherboard, I noticed the Windows XP "Programs" menu would appear very
slowly and disappear slowly. I noticed subsequently that this occured in
any menu. I reset my BIOS settings to what they had been prior to replacing
the motherboard, and this made no difference.

After installing Rise of Nations, I kept getting VPU errors and messages
stating that the VPU was unable to fully recover from hardware deadlock and
the system was switching over to software rendering.

I tried updating to the latest drivers, and the screen would streak blue and
white on reboot. I was then given a blue screen with a "HARD STOP" message.
I switched back to last known good settings and uninstalled the card and
reinstalled it. This did not solve anything. I tried again and tried the
new drivers once again with the same result as before (streaked screen, hard
stop message).

I've gone back to last known good settings and know Windows will detect the
cards, but will not install the drivers.

Is this a hardware issue or a software issue?

(As a side note, I also switched heatsink/fan combos when replacing my
motherboard. Prior to the motherboard dying, the VPU would run at around
69C, last I checked before this problem started, it was at 73C -could this
cause such errors?)

Thanks,
--
Brett Tyre