OK, thanks for the good suggestions. I'm making progress here. I did like you all said and tore it back down to basics and even installed a cheap, basic video card that I had layinig around.
It worked!
Next thing I did was set all the bios functions while it was giving a display. Finally, I started swapping the parts back in one by one until I found the offending piece. Turns out it was the dang wireless network card. I pulled it from a working machine but it sure does nothing in this one...
Oh well... Now friggin' Windows want's me to re-activate even though I pulled this HD and OS from a working machine. What a pain.
The video card fan sounds like a vacuum cleaner!