I really liked 440BX myself and lets not forget it's big brother 440GX which was essentially the same but with support for greater amounts of memory. However, the 440Bx is getting old now and starting to show it's age. I think it's about time to move on. The good news is we seem to have a couple of good replacements for it from Intel. I850 and I860 seem to be a couple of good relaible and stable chipsets much like the 440Bx and 440GX were. That's why when I did upgrade from my dual P3 440BX Tyan Tiger 100 I went with a dual P4 Xeon I860 Supermicro board. I haven't regretted it one bit. I still have my old Tiger 100 and I'll probably keep it for some time to come as it served well during it's day, but eventually the time comes to move along to a more advanced platform. When it comes to PCs you can't really become too attached to your hardware as everthing moves so fast and technology marches on with or without you. So, if you cling to the old too long you'll just get left behind.
As for waiting for 64bit processors you may be waiting a while. One question that has to be asked is do we really need 64bit processors for desktop systems. Right now I think the answer to that is no. The real reason you want a 64bit processor is if your working with very large data structures in memory and of course then you have to have large amounts of memory. The main benfit of a 64bit processor would be being able to directlty and quickly access more than 4GBytes of memory. Right now most desktop systems don't even have this much memory. Anyway, even if you do need to access more than 4GBytes of ram any Intel Processor from the Pentium Pro on up can access upto 16GBytes using something called PAE or physical address extension. It's just that a single segment of memory can't be over 4GBytes. So, the only real advantage of 64bit would be memory segments larger than 4Gbytes. If your data fits all in one segment you can theoretically access it faster. So, a 64bit processor could be faster when working on datasets greater than 4GB in main memory. For most average desktop users I'm not sure that's a real issue and thus I'm not sure 64bit processors are gonna take over real soon in the desktop arena. For large supercomputers it's a different stroy and thats where you already see 64bit processors being used.