I was considering buying your retail bundle Hox, but it wouldn't have done enough for what I needed. I'm building a system for my sister and bro-in-law that will need to survive for 5 years overseas in a tropical environment without access to good techs.
Ended up going with C2D E6400 and an Intel BadAxe board. The i965 boards are nice, but I'm a little leery of the aftermarket JMicron IDE if an OS needs to be reinstalled, so I went with a 975x board. Not cheap, but I wanted features, reliability, and stability, and good stock performance. Also, NewEgg has several versions of Vista that come with upgrade coupons for the same price as the regular versions; I got them a copy of MCE 2005 with the coupon.
As for RAM, Newegg has some Crucial 10th anniversary DDR2-667 for a great price (well, great considering current high ram prices) that's incredibly low latency compared to similarly priced RAM, and reputed to clock up pretty well. If I didn't already have a great DDR system with 2GB of OCZ, I'd probably purchase a pair for myself.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6820148017
Just waiting on a used Radeon X1800GTO2 512MB (limited edition Sapphire card, basically a slightly lower-clocked X1800XT) that should come today; doing a minor upgrade since it was a good deal. I don't see DX10 being a factor for some time to come, so this should hold me over for awhile.