Another Ram Problem

I have a friend who started getting weird errors on his computer so I teched it out for him and the only thing that stopped the error was removing his 128mb pc100 sdram chip leaving him with a 32mb chip in the machine...I put a new stick of identical 128mb ram in it and it works fine...I put this "defective" stick in my personal machine and bios recognizes it and windows recognizes it but I get Vcache errors with it in...take it out and all is well what could have happened to this chip....I had to reinstall his o.s. also as the registry was missing from the drive...does this sound like a power hit to you?