About ASUS A7N8X Del. and memory issue

Hi everybody,

I bought my new computer around 4 months ago:

- AMD Athlon 2700XP (13x166)
- ASUS A7N8X Deluxe BIOS Rev. 1004
- ATI Radeon 9700 Pro (drivers: Catalyst 3.6)
- SoundBlaster Audigy 2
- HDD Western Digital 80Gb
- 2x512 Kingston (mod.: KVR333x64C25)
- Windows XP Home Ed. (SP1)

I installed the memory in Dual channel (sockets 1 & 3), and in the begining the system seems to be performing fine, but then it will randomly close programs that are running (Word, Windows Media Player...). I just received an error and was forced to close the program. Gaming was even worse: after 30 or 40 min. the system crashed or rebooted. Sometimes (it happened 3 or 4 times), after a crash and when I was trying to restart, I got the following message:

Windows XP could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: \WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM.

The only solution was to reinstall Windows (Ok, not the only: http://support.microsoft.com/defau [...] s;307545).

I tryed changing sticks from slots 1 & 3 to slots 2 & 3, but the problem remained the same.
After reading posts in every forum I know, it´s clear to me that it's a memory issue. I believe that Some sticks from Kingston don't work well with the nForce2 chipset. Even more, I've read that they do not work very well in dual slots. Just in case, I decided to check both sticks using Memtest 3.0. I tryed testing every module individually in differents slots and I got errors in all of the cases (amazing: after testing for 4 hours one of the sticks in the slot 3, I got over 6000000 errors!!!). But the point is that the number of errors for the same module is different dependig of the slot I put it.
I haven't tested the modules in all the positions, but I believe it's no necessary.
Do you believe my sticks (both of them)are damaged?, or it could be a Mobo failure?.

I was thinking about getting a pair of sticks from Corsair (Twinx1024-2700ll), but I read in NforcesHQ's forums that some guys are having problems with corsair's modules. It's strange because those sticks are supposed to be tested to work fine in dual mode.

I don't know what to do. Please, I need your advise. Any suggestion will be truly wellcome.

Thanks in advance

Pepe

PS: sorry about my english. I have to improve it. Regards from Spain!!

Thanks for your help. I set the "DDR Reference Voltage" at 2.7 v (the default option is 2.6 v), but the results remained the same: tons of error reported by Memtest. By the way, the default settings for the memory timings are: 2.5 3 3 7. Are those the correct ones?.
Just another question: I get different number of errors for the same stick depending of the socket I plug it. Even more, one of the sticks reports 0 errors on sockets 1 & 2, but gets 81072 errors on socket 3 . For the other stick, Memtest reports errors (a different number: from 2214 to over a million) in the 3 sockets... Is it normal?, I mean, Could I say that is memory issue and not a Mobo issue?... pls, help!! this is crazy!!

Thanks thanks thanks to all of you!!

Regards