Well, I am back up and running with a new mainboard (motherboard), swap drive, memory, and hard drive. My Athlon 1800+ chip is working fine. With a little assistance from the seller of this board I was able to get the CPU running at its proper speed. It was not damaged in some way when I burned out my old motherboard as I initially suspected.
My hot swapper stopped functioning (which I feel is kind of strange). I do not know if this was due to the burning out of my computer but I do know that a lot of things did burn out and it might have been a casualty of this incident or it just could have been a cheap no good hot swapper.
The mainboard I have is a cheap one but it has all the functionality I need right now. It was a step backwards in some regards. It has four DIMM slots but they are not all dedicated to the same type of memory. Two hold SDRAM while the other two take DDR ram. It is what some call a transitional board allowing one to use the SDR memory with the ability to move to the double data rate memory. The burned out board had three DDR DIMM slots.
For a little while there one could have purchased SDRAM memory much more cheaply than DDR but for some inexplicable reason the cost of SDRAM is just about the same as DDR memory now so I got 256MB of DDR memory but at the slower speed of 266 megahertz as opposed to the 256MB I did have which could run at 333 megahertz.
This decrease in speed of the memory really doesn’t matter since I never had a motherboard that could utilize the speed of my old memory (and my new board is no different)
The board I have now does come with built on USB 2.0 ports while the burned out board only supported the first manifestation of USB so the new board does come with some positives. I am just happy to be up and running once more.