Vista won't boot up with new system. hardware not supported?

I had just built my brand new system this week and I was pretty excited
The current configuration is:
Q9400 Quad Core
Patriot Viper 2GB DDR3
SAMSUNG Spinpoint F1 HD753LJ 750GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive (OEM)
Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium SP1 64-bit (OEM)
ASUS P5Q3 DELUXE/WIFI-AP CH1-11 LGA 775 Intel P45 ATX Intel Motherboard

On the first installation of Vista it froze halfway through expanding the files so i restarted and installed Vista again. (without formatting or anything)
Then after getting everything set up and me being really happy with my new system I restarted after installing the ASUS motherboard CD drivers, Graphics Card drivers and my NOD32 anti-virus. and things were going smooth until I restarted again after updating vista... it installed the updates and such while shutting down but then when booting up and configuring the updates it would constantly freeze halfway through. So I would end up restarting and restarting trying to get it to go through. so then I ended up booting it in safe mode and it went through and configured it alright. but then restarted and while booting up windows normally it freaking would always freeze on the vista logo (w/black bg) or on the log in screen. i would constantly constantly restart and restart and restart until it finally let me (omg when i got here it crashed again thank you firefox for saving it) log in. so i formatted hte hard drive got a new DVD drive and installed vista again. now it quit between copying and expanding files!! so i restarted, reformatted and reinstalled. worked this time. but now it's doing the same thing as before wheere it freezes on start up, even worse after attempting updates again.
is it my hardware configuration?
I still have my other IDE 300gb hard drive and IDE Dvd drive hooked up. could that be causing problems?
I also have 500watt Power Supply and ATI 2600xt graphics card.
please help and thanks a bunch!

OMG GOTHAM NEEDS ME!?

Sounds like a faulty memory module or power supply. Try removing one stick of RAM and see if that helps your stability issues.