P5KC MB Rendered Unbootable by Bios Upgrade - Switch to P5K3 Deluxe?

I purchased a P5KC board using 2 DDR3 ram sticks of OCZ. I was
getting a message to upgrade the bios on reboot. I am using the new
Intel 9450 QC CPU (45 nm). So I upgraded the bios to latest ASUS
version and the system would not boot. The mb light was on, fans were
on etc. There are many other reports of this happening with the P5KC
such as: http://forums.hexus.net/scan-care-he...s-failure.html

I was able to boot again by removing the battery and clearing the CMOS
vis the applicable jumper on the mb, but as soon as i changed anything
in the bios, the system reverted to a non-bootable state. On the third
go round of this, the system hung on booting into Windows Vista and
at that point I had had enough of this board.

I shipped the P5KC back to Amazon as defective and purchased the P5K3
Deluxe, a board that costs $75 US more.

I am assuming I will have a similar bios error when I use this board.
Are the problems w/the bios upgrade playing havoc with these boards as
well or is this limited to the P5KC?

I realize the P5KC may have been one of a series of bad boards for
this series. I wasn't going to risk another failure.

It has also been suggested that upgrading the bios via the ASUS
utility while running VISTA is a bad idea. It is better to use the old
method of updating the bios via the bios using a floppy disk or a
flash drive - the ASUS windows method corrupts the eprom permanently
according to these posts.

Please comment on:

-P5KC vs P5K3 Deluxe in terms of this problem
-The method of updating the bios
-If all ASUS boards have a bios that must be udpated if one is using
the new 45nm Intel QC CPUs

Thank you.

Richard