My mistake...

What an idiot! It turns out I moved a 'jumper' on the new motherboard that I was attempting to boot up and forgot to reset it in it's proper place - so my previously reported eBay failure was a success after all...
Fortunately I was outbid on a replacement that I had already lined up - so I have been busy for a couple of days configuring my new set-up.
I have ended up with a 2.2GHz AMD Athalon CPU on a ECS Extreme motherboard in a nice new case using one of my old hard-drives (80GB) and an old 512MB RAM stick. I intend to get some more RAM and a nice big SATA drive to finish the system off, but this is what the system has cost me so far:
CPU (eBay) £31.00
Mobo (eBay) £30.50
PC case (eBay) £25.92
Hard-drive - already had
graphics card - already had
CD drive - already had
XP pro - already had
RAM - already had
A grand total of £87.42
(all including postage) which I don't think is too bad for a complete PC which seems to function very nicely even with the single RAM stick (I am already bidding on some RAM!!) I will probably treat myself to a new DVD writer, but right now it's not really essential.. I must report though that installing a new OS and getting things just as you want them on a new PC is quite a satisfying experience, it's only when they start to get loaded up with lots of different applications that they start to become erratic, slow and generally annoying.