Acer :: Ferrari 3400 Dead (again) With Strange Behaviour

About a year ago my Ferrari 3400 kicked the bucket, but it turned out that it was the RAM that had gone bad, I replaced the stick and it worked beautifully again.

Around that time I also bought another 1 gig stick to get it up to the 2 gig mark.

Both sticks are Ultra PC3200 400Mhz Sticks.

This evening while working on a website my computer froze up completely. I rebooted and similar to the last time it died, it wouldn't post.

So I tried pulling out the RAM, trying 1 stick at a time, one slot at a time, reversing the sticks etc.

Once the screen actually lit up and there was a flashing cursor. But the next time I tried there was nothing.

Following this I tried a spare 256mb sodimm I had kicking around, this time it posted fine and seemed to be good, but following the post screen hung at a black screen. I reset and it once again refused to post.

So I tried swapping in all the sticks again with different combos, finally once more the spare stick managed to get it to post but with the same result.

I'm completely baffled now. This thing's well beyond the warranty period now, my gig sticks I think are both still covered, but I'm really doubting that the RAM is really the issue. Could it be a processor issue?