Ok, I just completely rebuilt everything. I checked the motherboard and the area on the case where the motherboard sits for any debris that could short stuff out. I didn't see any debris, but I did carefully brush it off. But to my surprise, when I powered it up again, voila, it finally gets to the POST and runs BIOS. Everything checks out OK except the hard drive though. I screwed around with the IDE cables and shit, but it doesn't not detect the hard drive correctly. I will test another cable and stuff and test another drive to see if the mobo IDE circuitry is cool. One thing I am wondering is that there are a total of 7 screws that attach the board to the case. Unfortunately I only have 4 screws that are long enough to do the job. There may be some grounding issues? Any circuitry near where a screw is supposed to be may need the nearby area of the ground plane to have a direct connection to chassis ground.
Despite these new issues, at least it seems like I'm getting somewhere
Thanks for the suggestions