Try reseating your video card. Again!

...really? Wow, and to think getting a new one would be the end of my life's problems. I guess I'll have to get used to it. Not that I'm mad I got a new one, the old one was a big pile of crap (it's Trident, what do you expect?), but yeah...thanks anyway.

Assuming it's something with the graphics card try another slot and cleaning the contacts of the thing with rubbing alcohol or pencil eraser .

If all the above fails take everything else out and try to work the computer with only CPU and ram. It should beep at you indicating the missing video card. Then see what happened when you add Video card. And always listen for helpful beeps.

Also, did you take a look at your bios battery lately? If you have one of the old barrel type NiCD battery, sometime they can leak corrosive stuff and damage boards. Id check that out in any case, even if you fix the computer by simply reseating the video card.

When it comes to 486 and older machines always look for the battery when there are hardware related problems. If it is leaking replace it or remove it right away. I even wash boards that have sat for a long time after the battery has leaked then air blast it to remove any electrically conductive contaminants like salts.

I should mention I cleaned the contacts of my old one countless times and even moved it to a different seat, only to see it fail to boot mere days later. The new card is PCI rather than ISA, so it only further raises questions.
Actually, my battery is a Dallas RTC (a DS12887 to be exact), which uses an encased lithium ion battery. I probably should remove it at some point so I don't have to worry about explosions or anything, but I doubt it's my problem. In fact, it STILL remembers the time after all these years. No joke, I only pulled it out a couple months back (I haven't had the thing out since 2000) and it still knew that it was 2012. How do you manage that?

The Dallas RTC will not explode. Barrel style NiCad is what you should be afraid of.

If you have spare parts, try the following:

- remove all wires, cables from the motherboard. Start with the power connectors.
- discharge the motherboard completely. This can take some time. Reset the clear cmos jumpers - this might be done twice: the 2nd time is when you put the mobo under current again.
- put in some tested RAM, suitable for the mobo: low capacity FPM RAM is preferred. Use one module and try all slots if necessary, starting from simm slot 0 (bank 0). If you have SIMM 30 slots only, you will need to fill up the 1st 4 slots.
- reconnect the floppy drive
- put an ISA video card back, not the PCI one. You might need to change some PCI settings in CMOS but you need to get there first
- Get a guide for the BIOS to be able to identify error beeps
- Get an ISA motherboard test card if you can. This is the easiest way to find out where the boot process stalls
- when booting up, do a hard reset immediately, then try to enter BIOS