Not wanting to finish booting unless certain drives were disconnected. But one of those drives would still boot by itself.
It's been six or seven years since a rebuild. It actually performed very well for it's much used time.
For those interested it was a Gigabyte MB "GA-EP45T-UD3LR" with a E8400 Core 2 Duo, 3.0GHZ.
I also suspected the very old power supply might of had something to do with it so I ordered a new motherboard, processor, power supply, and ssd drive (the old one will boot on it's own, but hangs the system if it is hooked up with another boot drive???). Like I said, some strange stuff going on.
The whole point of this post is to report the audio findings of the new rebuild.
With the last system, I was able to get it to run at a MOTU soundcard sample rate setting of 96000, a buffer setting of 16 with 0 buffers in AMP to get latency readings, but got nothing but pops and errors while running audio. With the current build I am listening to audio at those settings while photoshopping the attached image and creating this post with no clicks and not a single error....
I have opened and closed programs, grabbed a window and dragged it all over the screen and so far cannot create a single pop or error. I am very impressed!!!
I still have the computer case open and as long as no spinner hard drives are attached, when I hit the power button, there is absolute silence except for the beep and it goes from powered off to desktop ready in about 6 to 7 seconds... Very cool.
Once again for those interested, here's the new system.
Gigabyte Z97M-D3h, I did alot of digging on motherboards as there seems to be problems with alot of what is currently available (even by trusted names).
Intel i7-4790, 3.6 GHZ, 8 MB Cache, LGA 1150 Processor with factory heatsink and fan.
Silencer MKIII 750W Power supply.
This is using the processor's "onboard" graphics to run a 1920 X 1080 monitor.
It is also a default install of AMP with no setting changes (cores, ect)....
Very impressed, great work Bob P!!!

EDIT: Just noticed that when you go to 96000, the lowest buffer rate is 32, not 16. Sorry for the error...
EDIT2: Forgot to mention that this is on 64 bit Win7.