I have a Shuttle AK31 Version 3 with an AMD Athlon XP 1800...

Tigerflag, if you go with the Shuttle AK32-A... you might find this website useful...

http://ak31.timechange.com

Thanks for the link!
That problem of RAM causing foul-ups if it's installed in neighboring slots is common in a lot of motherboards. I always install it in slots 1 and 3 (or is it 0 and 2?), or just get one large stick.

Avoid using the Soyo KT400 Ultra Platinum Plus with Linux if possible! When I first bought it no Linux disto would install unless I first disabled the onboard Highpoint controller. I bought the board partly because the Soyo web page said it was compatible with Linux. Shortly afterwards I discussed the problem on a Soyo users forum and discovered that no one had been able to make any Linux distro work on that motherboard. Several people had tried.

When Red Hat 9 came out it was the first distro that installed and ran properly with all features enabled on the motherboard. Two days ago I installed Slackware 9 and it works although I am having to start it from a boot disk at the moment because the Slack setup program could not install Lilo for me. I will skip the details on that problem for now. In the past I have installed Red Hat, SuSE and Mandrake on my old computer, so I do not think it is that I did not know how to install Linux.

Works fine with an Asus A7S333.

I'm really surprised that you couldn't get slackware to work on your Asus board. What IDE chipset does it use?