I feel for ya, my 3 year old Dell (also a $3k machine) went the way of the dodo a few weeks ago, I decided to instead invest $1600 on parts and put it together myself, much happier then whatever Dell provides these days.
If you need a computer for web browsing, they are great, spend $400 and get tech support and whatnot, for gaming, no more Dell for me.
I started with tremendous nvidia driver/blue screen of death crashes, which culminated in a completely corrupt registry.
So I swapped a brand new HD into the system and tried to install win XP Pro, Home and win2k, and none of it could boot into windows, blue screen every time. With no way to extract my old data (this was the only SATA system we had) my wife and I just figured it was eaiser on my sanity to build a new system then to try and figure out this one for the next 3 months...
I THINK it's possible Dells cruddy RAM gave out under me, but I don't know for sure, and don't have any extra RAM to test it. The only thing I miss with my Dell XPS is the sweet case, I'm gonna miss that front LED, used to change it's color once a month at least
