Wow! My machine totally died during the time you were responding. However, coincidentally I was going back through the hardware I had replaced recently and removed one of my most recent SIMM "upgrades" replacing it with the old one which has less memory but runs at the same speed.
It still won't let me load Mint9, nor Kubuntu 10.04, Ubuntu 10.04, or gOS but it would let me load Ubuntu 9.04 and build up from there. Everything is as it should be now except for all the lost data. Hundreds of hours of writing and music editing. From now on I will back up weekly.
Still not sure if the memory was the entire problem due to just mentioned inability to load recent OS's, however I am just glad to back in action.
Thanks for your help and any further thoughts as to what may be holding me back (inadequate system requirements, etc...) please feel free to contribute.
Peace.

It certainly sounds like you have a hardware problem somewhere. Try booting the system with only one memory module installed at a time and run memtest from the bootup menu. Let memtest run for at least a few hours in order to verify that the memory is ok.
Ubuntu 9.04 will reach end of life (EOL) at the end of this month:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releases
After an Ubuntu version reaches EOL the repos will disappear and you will no longer be able to get updates or install new software.
I would recommend doing a clean install of Ubuntu 10.10 when it comes out on 10-10-10. Or do a clean install of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS which is available now.

Wow, my last SIMM upgrade was back in time in my 386, since then I have never seen a SIMM again.

TOMMCD - I already upgraded to 10.04 through the Update Manager and am just happy this ancient thing is working at all. Perhaps if it dies again I'll keep the memory test in mind. Thanks for your help.

TobiSGD - That's what happens when you're poor and live in the U.S... You get punished for being poor and are only allowed to use legacy products others throw away. If I ever find work again perhaps I'll be fortunate enough to understand why SIMM's have become obsolete...

I don't believe that you have SIMMs in your Pentium 4-machine. Maybe it is a little bit older (at least it does its job), but I don't think it is that old.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIMM

Yep! That's them. Single In-line Memory Modules, 512M @ 333MHz each. Look just like the ones in the pictures. Does this mean something important? They came with the system originally which was my friends when he was doing post-doc work between 2002 and 2006 when he came into some money and officially gave it to me after buying himself something really bad-a$$.
Is there something important I'm missing?