well that's thing:
I've replaced the CMOS battery. TWICE. There is NO setting in the CMOS to disable the onboard graphics adapter. NONE. there is no jumper on the mobo, either. There is a "PCI or AGP" option. But this doesn't help. I mean, the onboard vga is on the AGP bus, anyways.
So yeah--- i've tried all those reccomendations a thousand times over. Nothing seems to work! It just boots up, (after I reset the CMOS with AGP card out) works fine, then when I shut it down, it just doesn't boot up again! It just sits there, ossilating between the two cards. I can tell it's not running post, by listening to it.
I've posting at computing.net, here's the link if anyone's interested. thanks so far everybody!
http://computing.net/hardware/wwwboard/forum/45348.html