vista crashes first boot

I thought I did my homework in gettng ready for this Beta. Drivers and Bios are current and system stable for 12 months. Reviewed the good, bad, and ugly on install experiences. Took a deep breath and installed from a Microsoft mailed CD.
Installed from XP SP2 with current updates on a new partition on a single SATA drive. Vista ackknowledged the selected partition, downloaded a few extra files from online, copied files for 5 minutes then rebooted. A nice looking folded blue curtain appeared, then Rollback flashed by and a message. "To prevent damage---------, check for bios updates......disable memory caches.....
I rebooted and was stuck recycling from the nice blue screen. Would not boot to any options, safe or unsafe including Dos. I tried XP recovery disk it got stock in the same above routine. I went for my big gun, an Acronis True Image bootable disk. And it recovered perfectly off a USB back up drive.
The only error report was 08E, 0X5,0X81C4013C, 0X0. No other apparent symptoms. This was on a 12 month old Intel 875 P4 system on an MSI board with an ATI 256mb video card on Microsoft's list. Lots of Ram & Drive space. What every Vista didn't like, it was fatal and left no tracks.
-- Regards, From Whidbey