hardware problem

please make sure you do or did the followings;

make another partition on your 46GB hard drive it is too big, your mother board might not support big partitions.
install your mother board drivers properly (uninstall first, reboot,reinstall,reboot).
use your Gforce CD to install the driver for your AGP card (you are using Microsoft defult drivers as i can see), make sure you install the VIA AGP support (it is in your mother board CD), from the BIOS select the proper speed of your GForce card (4X),

regards

Thank you for your kind words, Lisa - I just wish we'd been able to get to the heart of your problem. If it's any consolation, I'm still on the case with this problem - I have no doubt that it's a hardware problem and I think that error 1003 message is telling us what the fault is and that it's just a matter of finding the info somewhere.

Good luck with your trip :)

You're very welcome and good for you for being firm with the dealer. very good luck.