whatever you do don't buy Asrock motherboards as they are totally terrible cheap and unreliable pieces of umm...hardware.
Seems like you might have just had a bit of bad luck. I've never had any problem with my AsRock board. In fact aside from an AOpen AX6BC 440BX (which is pretty much retired to experimenting status) it is one of the oldest boards I have running. Some have better features than others but for the most part I've done pretty good on MB longevity.
The old board list:
AOpen AX6BC (runs a 1Gz P-3)
AsRock K7S41GX (runs a Sempron 2.2Gz)
Shuttle AK31V3.0 (runs an OC Athlon XP @ 2Gz Palamino core)
PCchips M825LU V7.2 (runs an OC Athlon XP @ 2.2Gz TB-b core)
Asus P4B-LA (Pull from an HP. Runs a stock 2.30Gz P-4 Northwood)
Soyo (Socket 775 runs a stock dual core Pentium D Pressler)
Still have a Dell socket 478 with a Celeron 2.8 Northwood but I really don't have a use for that one. About the only board that I have had straight up die in the last few years was an ECS P-4 board pulled from an E-machines T-2245.
Most of the newer stuff that I have done for myself or others I have pretty much stuck with Asus or Gigabyte MBs.
YMMV