I found a Totem TM-P2BXAT on the 'Bay recently. Being a North-American, I haven't any experience with Totem motherboards, but some cursory research seemed to suggest they were more or less solid. It's one of those transitional baby-AT / Micro-ATX boards with both AT and ATX PSU connectors. Looks very similar to an equivalent Asus P2B -- 440BX under a green heatsink and everything.

The problem is, I can't get it to power on with the front panel header Power Sw pins when using an ATX supply. I measured across them and there's a 3.3V pull-up on one, Gnd on the other, so standby is obviously working. If I attach an ATX-to-AT adapter and use the AT pins, it powers up fine.

A manual I found online DOES say that if you configure any of the KB/mouse soft-on options, the front panel switch is disabled. (Huh? Why?) I can choose between Mouse L, Mouse R, Password, Hotkey, and BUTTON ONLY. So I chose BUTTON ONLY, because it sounded right .. and it was all in caps, which has to mean something. No change.

I'm wondering if it might be a BIOS bug because it doesn't seem totally polished. For example (this is an Award BIOS, BTW):

I have a straight-through floppy ribbon installed, so I use the floppy A/B swap option to make the solo 3.5" floppy respond as A:. I wasn't really sure whether, in the basic settings screen, if I should set Floppy A or Floppy B to 1.44MB 3.5", so I decided to try A: first. Nope -- got Floppy Failed (40) during POST. OK, makes sense -- don't lie to the BIOS, tell it what I really have and let it lie to DOS instead.

So I changed Floppy A to None and set Floppy B to 1.44MB 3.5". But I still got a Floppy Failed (40) during POST, so I went back to the settings and ..... it had swapped it back to Floppy A. ??? I tried again. Floppy A = None, Floppy B = 1.44MB 3.5". Save. Exit. Floppy Failed (40). Enter Setup. Floppy A was configured again. hmmm...

OK, well, how about if I set BOTH to 1.44MB 3.5"? Now I get a POST floppy seek, AND a Floppy Failed (40). Both are still configured. So it seems you can't set a Floppy B without a Floppy A -- it just won't save the setting.

Anyone else have any experience with soft-on issues? Or maybe have a BIOS update tucked away somewhere?