Booting problem, CMOS jumper

Hello everyone,

I've got an odd problem with a computer one of my friend's asked me to look
at. He's also a computer person, but just thought some different eyes
might help. They're not . The problem is that the box won't boot up
unless you clear the CMOS on the motherboard first. And even then,
sometimes it won't accept power. Even a warm reboot will cause it to hang.
One time it took me four different times of switching the jumper before it
would accept any power at all, and then it did boot. According to him,
when the menu comes up saying that the CMOS as been cleared, press F1 to
continue or DEL to setup, if you go into Setup, good luck getting it to
restart anytime soon. He has changed the battery twice, but I was under
the impression that newer motherboards didn't even use the CMOS that way;
the battery was really only for the clock and that everything is flashed
BIOS now. One thing we have considered is flashing the BIOS, which hasn't
been done yet. It's a Pentium 4 (thought it comes up as Pentium 4 1.2Ghz,
CPU Brand: Pentium 4 2.4Ghz). He's got a newer nVidia graphics card (FX
5900), couple of hard drives, and 1GB RAM. I'm not sure what the
motherboard brand is, but it's new, within last couple years.

I'm about to brave the setup menu to see just how messed up I can make it,
but I was wondering if anyone out there had had any experience with this
happening and could say, 'Oh yeah, that's...' before I incapacitate his
computer.


Thanks,
jab3