Help, Big trouble with Abit VH6T & 1.1a Celly

The system has been working okay for half a year, the setup is:

Abit VH6T
1.1a Celeron/tualatin running at 1.41GHz, 1.625V, 128FSB
Crucial 256Mb pc133

Yesterday I wanted to add a stick of PNY 512Mb pc133. I took the crucial out and was trying to put the PNY in the same slot, stupid me, the RAM direction was WRONG, I think it was not snapped in comfortably.

Powered on, no post, a BURNING SMELL.

Changed back to crucial, now the system was messed up. It won't post at default 1.1GHz or anything higher than that. It can only post at 733Mhz (66X11), and when it does boot up, it's extremely unstable, all kinds of errors, automatically reboots.

I am postitive the Video card, hard drive and the RAM are okay, searched for burn marks, but didn't find any.

Comments? Ideas? Big Thanks!

Are you running the crucial in the same slot that you fubarred the PNY in? If you are, then try in in another mem slot and see if it works then. If it doesn't, then I would guess that you messed somthing up on the board. Burning Smell generally = bad news.

Changed RAM to other memory slots, CMOS reset to defalut, not helping

It can boot up from a fresh CMOS reset, it will boot as 733Mhz and say "CMOS checksum error, defaults loaded", if I press F1 to continue, sometimes it can boot up to safe mode or even windows XP but very unstable. It won't post at 1.1GHz and above at any voltage.

Removed Mobo from case, found a screw at the corner of the case, something might get short?

"CMOS checksum error" while booting for me so far ususally means a poor heatsink cpu contact. I have that problem from a lapping heatsink. i switched it to a nonlapping one and system has since been stable. you might want to resent heatsink or switch cpu to see if that is the problem.

Will it boot into DOS with enough stability so that you can flash the BIOS? If it crashes while flashing it's game over 'tho.

My Tualeron will run (for short periods of time) without any heatsink so I don't think that's the problem.

- JW

1.1 at only 1.41, what was the problem before this mess?