Monitor loses signal when X runs. Also unreliable internet in Etch 4 rel 3

I've had very mixed success installing Debian. Have tried both Etch 4.0 r2 and r3. must use DVD install because it won't find a mirror (calls my motherboard ethernet connector "Unknown device: Marvell Technology". DHCP will not work. on reboot, though, I see it recognizes a 100Mbs connection during the startup string AND some packages HAVE punched through to update during install from dvd sources. No Idea where to go with that!

ANYTIME I try mount a usb device (working in terminal cause X doesn't work, yet) I get the same directory (which isn't on my stick) listing directories 001 - 005 and then a text file called DEVICES, which looks like config info for all my USB ports when I cat it.

X WILL NOT DRIVE MY GRAPHICS CARD. when X executes, the screen goes blank, followed by the monitor firmware "Lost Signal" message and monitor hibernation. X -configure has not helped.

The GUI based installer DOES drive both the card and the mouse, so I know it can be made to work. I have also gotten X to work from the i386 installer, but there are so many SATA crashes on startup that I wait 10 minutes before I can type, and even then it has ambiguous and unreliable treatment of the drives. So living with i386 on a 64bit machine is OUT.

K. I'm new to Linux and Debian but not to computers or programming. I have the following bits in my box: AMD 9500 4core 2.2Ghz CPU, ASUS M3A32-MVP motherboard w/ 4G DDR2 onboard, NVIDIA EVGA 8800GT video card w/ 512M.

Please help, somebody. I'm disgusted with wndows and I really want to make this work out.