I don't know if this was only a local thing or not, but I remember that around that time was when most people first discovered liquid cooling. Every LAN party I went to seemingly had increasingly ridiculous setups, most of which lacked any reservoir, some of which lacked radiators (and failed miserably). This was fine on it's own despite the lack of any specialized parts (many contained pieces from the B&Q Garden Centers and burned out Ford Fiestas) making them a little unpredictable.
The problems started when people caught on that putting tap water into your computer was potentially a bad idea and they began trying to substitute it with other fluids. There were two camps; those who were worried about leaks and wanted less electrical conductivity and those who were confident theirs would not leak and were more concerned with thermal conductivity. I saw petrol, vegetable oil, soap, pure anti-freeze, mineral oil, purified water, some kind of dye, vodka and this one guy got thrown out for attempting to use mercury(!) in his loop - he was in the second group obviously.
I remember one guy had an ingenious system where he sucked the air out of the cooling loop through a valve and used a pressure switch of some kind to switch the power off if the loop leaked.
Open T-Points at the top of the case was the in-thing to do, I always remember this one guy getting mad because he lost at Q3A and bashing his monitor which fell off the back of the desk and smashed, his elbow caught the PC case and tipped it over onto it's side. Needless to say, the monitor was the least of his worries at this point and he kicked the desk and left never to be seen again.
The worst one I saw was a friend of mine who used tap water, would have been fine, but he was an early adopter and never replaced the water, only topped it up. That K6 machine was crap anyway, but the open cooling loop made horrible smells when the system got warm.
There was also an influx of these horrible cheap kits which had tubing made of nylon, it was only around one millimeter thick. Those never lasted long and always ended the same way.
Hehe, good memories. Incidentally, I have liquid cooling on my 775 box, but it's pretty standard fare with two radiators, regular non-conductive fluid, two heat blocks (CPU+GPU) and a decent reservoir. It leaks a bit after six years though, so if you dig yours out you should definitely test it first.