Just my 2 cents
Leon are you planning to use the PC for all you computing (ie internet MSOffice etc )?
I am a firm believer that this is a main reason for poor PC performance .if so you might want to consider making a extra partition and a dual booting system with the music stuff only (basically just whatever software you use for music and windows and nothiung else ('sept your music files of course)).I have to agree with everyone about rethinking the sb live .
800dv man you are bitter !! I hope you don't work for the postal service .Every 'Mac user I know will never go back to a PC .My PIII 1Ghz/512mb dual 20gb/7200rpm machine with a Lexicon Core2 Audio card ,has certainly crashed BUT (and I know this is a fairly large claim) It has NEVER Crashed during a recoding session .
It has nothing but windows 98se,Logic audio,Wavelab,acid and a few plugins on it.
(I'm not trying to stir you up just commenting that not all PC's a Complete pieces of S#$T).