Hi,

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Even motherboards with BIOS speed settings also have hardware jumpers that can manually control speed settings. This is to overcome the chicken-and-egg situation where you set the speed too high in the BIOS; now the machine won't even start, to let you get back into the BIOS to set it lower again. It may be that the motherboard jumpers have been set to a "manual" speed setting, not letting you set the speed in the BIOS at all (or so that those settings have no effect).
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I think you're probably right in suggesting that jumper settings may be responsible. However, since the machine is being returned, I'm reluctant to mess with the hardware. Thanks for the input but it looks as if the exact problem will now remain a mystery (although I'm almost tempted to keep the machine just to fathom it out<g>)

Regards,
Viv