*** p4p800e-dlx motherboard - won't post - bad memory socket (and questions)

Hi folks,

For those of you who are having some problems with the p4p800e-dlx, I
thought I would share my recent experience.

For the sake of brevity, I will condense things.

p4p800e-dlx
p4 3.0 northwood
2x512MB corsair xms memory
gigabyte 9600xt

Symptom: no post, no audio alert, no video. fans spin.

After some testing, it appears that my 2nd DIMM socket was bad! If I
put the two memory sticks in sockets 1 and 2, I would get a full 1GB
in single channel mode. If I put the memory in sockets 1 and 3 (for
dual channel mode), it would not post nor give me any voice alert. I
could place a single memory stick in either socket 1, 2, or 4 and it
would boot up just fine (yes, I used both memory modules just to be
sure that I did not have a bad one).

I spoke with ASUS tech support and went through a number of tests and
they told me to RMA the board.

I just thought I would share this with you all, just in case anyone
else is experiencing similar behaviour.

Now the questions....
I will have to remove the CPU and heatsink in order to send the board
back. What is the best way to remove the heatsink? Just pull it
straight up or should I twist it a bit? Also, will I need to clean
off the remnants of the thermal pad from the CPU and heatsink or will
I be able just to smush them back together again once I get the new
mb?

Thanks,
Zag