The person who suggested the power supply was the problem was partially correct. The thing finally stopped letting the machine boot. I had it replaced today. FYI, one of the 12v lines was putting out 1v under load (thanks go to RD and his bag of many tools for pointing this out). The guys at Itech (friends from the old days) said they pulled it out and tested it too and said there wasn't much left to it.
It looks like things are almost back to normal. Well at least as normal as you can get in half an hour and a week and a half turned off... Alas it does appear there is bloat creeping into our applications. The system monitor (over a couple of minutes) showed one processor spiking at 100% usage. Then again I have four user space programs open at once (three active and one waiting for input).
Later Mike