BIOS Flash issue

Question

I have a Neo-FIS2R board and I just tried to flash the BIOS from version 1.2 to version 1.8, and now the system is behaving very strangely...it will POST just fine, but it will not boot, not even from a Windows installation disk...it will get to the point where it asks me which OS I want to boot to (or the prompt that says "press any key to boot from CD...") but as soon as I make a selection (or press a key to boot from the CD) the system just hangs there, with the numlock light flashing on roughly a .5 second interval.
The only thing I've noticed that may be amiss is that on the POST screen, I now get a message that says "Checking NVRAM..No NVRAM", which I'm pretty sure is different from what it used to say before I flashed (I think it used to be "Checking NVRAM..NVRAM Ok")...could this be what's causing it, and if so, how should I fix it?
The other possible cause that I can see is that I had windows installed on a RAID array on the Via RAID controller, and maybe flashing somehow made the MB forget my array settings, but I've kind of ruled this possibility out as the system hangs exactly the same whether I try to boot from a copy of the OS installed on the array, or a different installation on a non-RAIDed disk, or the windows install disk itself...so any ideas?
I guess I should also note that I tried using the rescue disk created by LiveUpdate when I flashed, but apparently it's corrupted (luckily the error was caught BEFORE it tried to flash to my BIOS, so no harm was done though).  Is it possilble that re-flashing with a working rescue-disk would help?
System specs:
Neo FIS2R mainboard
Athlon64 3000+ (socket 754) at default clock speed w/ stock cooling
1 GB (2x 512) Geil Golden Dragon PC3200 RAM @ CL2, DDR400
2x WD Raptor 37 GB 10K RPM S-ATA HDD's in RAID-0 on the Via controller
160 GB WD P-ATA HDD (8 MB cache)
80 GB Maxtor P-ATA HDD (8 MB cache)
nVidia Geforce FX 5600XT graphics board (128 MB RAM)
Antec Sonata case w/ included PS
SB Audigy MP3+ sound card
Pinnacle PCTV TV Capture card
D-link DWL520+ Wireless network card (802.11b)
NEC 4x DVD+/- RW drive
Benq 32X CD-RW drive
Win XP Pro is installed on the RAID array, Win XP 64-bit is installed on a different partition of the RAID array, and a partition on the 80 GB drive also has an old Win XP install on it.
...any help would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

Well, I've gotten the keyboard working as it should, but only by connecting via the USB -> PS2 adapter to the PS2 port that was currently being used by the mouse...luckily, the mouse works fine on the PS2 port that the keyboard failed to work on.  Here's the behavior that I have now (all of which has been verified by using a second, known to be good, keyboard):
 - I cannot connect a USB keyboard and have access to it once the boot loader loads (unless I turn USB Legacy support on, in which case the computer will hang).
 - Once Win XP (non-64) boots up, I *can* disconnect my keyboard from the adapter and shove it in any USB port on the PC and have it work.
 - Win XP 64 will not let me use the keyboard via anything other than the PS2 port (which leads me to believe that this is actually a Win XP 64 problem, since it's *their* boot loader that's managing the list of available operating systems)
 - If I plug the keyboard into a USB port and boot the computer and wait for it to reach the OS selection screen, the numlock light will be on, and if I power off the computer at this point, the numlock light remains on until I physically remove the USB cable from the computer (which I think is just plain weird).
I guess it's most likely that this is an issue with the Win XP 64-bit code...but if it's not and it's actually something which was introduced by the BIOS update (which is possible, because the boot loader and Win XP 64 itself both worked fine until I flashed), then quite frankly I'm appalled that MSI would introduce such a significant bug in one of their updates...don't they do quality testing to make sure things like this don't happen?  I guess the bottom line is that USB Legacy Support *should* work, and it definately should NEVER cause the computer to fail to boot just because it happens to be enabled, regardless of what OS/boot loader is being used, so somebody (either at Microsoft or MSI) REALLY dropped the ball on this one...
EDIT:  and one other weird thing related to the flash...even though I have the Promise RAID controller disabled in the BIOS, the system still scans the controller for drives during startup...any way to make it stop doing this?