Crud Alert UPDATED

Nothing is happening again. Exactly the same way it happened before. Well, not exactly the same way it happened before, but nothing still means nothing even when it is different.
OK I can see I am going to have to explain,
Thanks to untoward events elsewhere my building no longer collects package deliveries for us sheeple consequently when our kindly postman can't rouse us when he has something (which is exactly every time because my buzzer is broken) he takes it back to the Forest Park Post Office. It is not really that far away, so Monday Morning I picked up the new motherboard.
And I took the thing apart and started over and still no joy. I Googled and I surfed and I posted and then I wrote a letter full of longing and sadness to the support folks at Asrock. Lo the heavens fairly boiled and within the hour I had a reply. I'm not kidding I was impressed
Reset the BIOS was what they said, which was new, so I googled, and then I reset the BIOS by clearing the CMOS and switching the jumpers from 1-2 to 2-3 with the battery out and then back to 1-2. Fine. No joy.
I changed the wiring a subtle little bit. No joy.

This big fan is on top of the CPU, the Intel brains of the deal, the Communist Party Usufruct, no just kidding it is the Central Processing Unit. It isn't the only Intel chip on this thing, but it is the royalty. Hence the fan.

Then I noticed, on the underside of the motheboard, up in the very corner of the CPU undermount, a bit of crud.

Underside of same

 All my Boomer Blame genes kicked in. It was a tiny fleck of pink packing foam heavily and adhesively embedded in whatever resinous shellac they coat the finished printed circuit with, and it would not come off without some serious teeth-clenching and tweezering and heartstopping scraping with surgical cedar splint. It is called surgical cedar because if you get a splinter of it in your butt you will need surgery to get it out of there. I speak from personal experience.

Foxconn!  Big surprise!

I never did get the last of it off of there but I am told the stuff isn't conductive and it wasn't my problem.
Darn. It is so nice to have a scapegoat.

All photographs taken with my HTC 4g slide phone camera.

 I'm taking the whole magilla over to Geoff the computer lifter as soon as the last bit I ordered arrives, which may be today if I can catch the package before it goes back to Forest Park.
EDIT: UPDATE
The first thing that  happens when bad things start is I feel like it is because I am a bad person. And then I dive into my guilt and swim around in all the things I should have done different, most of which are not actually what is causing the problem.
I felt bad because I got a cheap power supply, so I sent it back and got good (well, good-er) one. The power supply was not the issue. Then I felt bad because I had cheaped out and only gotten one RAM stick. So I blew another 25 bucks and got a second. Not the problem. Then I got another motherboard. Which didn't fix it. So when Geoff said the second motheboard was also DOA I remembered that I felt bad for getting the cheaper one that didn't have hardly any bells and no whistles at all. I upgraded 10 bucks worth. That unit was backordered, and they said it would be shipped in 2 to 4 weeks., but for another 15 bucks I could have it Monday. Fuck that, cancelled the order. Pissed me off. Then I found that for another 6 bucks ( 6 on top of the 10 on top of the 15) I could have the really good one, the H77M, overclockable, two USB3 ports, all kinds of other bullshit, and for 4 bucks more (now we've gone from $44 to $74) I could have it overnighted here by Friday morning. Hell yes. I stole another hundie out of the stash and good to go, I love Amazon prime. I ordered and cancelled 6 different motherboards and they still love me. They take my calls. They call me back. After each call I get an Email to ask if it was good for me. I don't smoke, but this is when I should light up a cigarette, take a deep drag and let out a long sigh and tap it in the ashtray by the bed.
What a life.