Mood: 
This freeze-up problem which lead to no video made no sense, so I plugged all my drives back in and got my video back after all, but Windows would still hard-lock just before the first systray icon would initialize.
I disabled the CD burner and PRESTO! Boots up fine! Why the FUCK would removing some of my drives have such an effect on the video card?!
I finally traced the problem to the original CD I burned, which was still in the drive. When Windows tried to verify the drive contents on Windows startup it again froze…bad burn!
Thank YOU, Nero 6!
/me downgrades back to v5.5…
Well, at least it wasn’t your motherboard. You were probably illegally copying anyway, so it serves you right!