sounds like its grounded. If you did the take it out thing, and it still wont post, then rma the board. (btw dude, i cant imagine how you feel right now.)
No way dude...there could be a number of things wrong here. Just because it doesn't post when taking out of the system doesn't mean you should RMA it. It means you've ruled out the possibility of grounding issue being the cause.
TonCrafter - There's not a whole lot to it man. Put everything in it's appropriate slots. Surely you know where IDE cables, SATA cables, and power cables go. The part with the jumpers is in the mobo manual, but if you're hitting power and it's attempting to turn it on then you've got those plugged in right.
Toss RAM and vid card in and bam. If you've powered up your computer, then you've built it right, there's just a little something getting in your way which happens frequently when building a comp from scratch.
Make sure you have all the connections on the mobo plugged in:
The 4pin molex connector near the PCI-E and the 4x Pin CPU power connector up near the CPU, and naturally the 20/24pin power connector.
Make sure the RAM and Video card are properly seated. Try removing them and putting back in making sure to put appropriate weight on them so that they go down. These components can take quite a bit before they break. (I just recently snapped a dead RAM stick in half, it's durable
)
Make sure it isn't something silly like you forgot to put the CMOS jumper back to normal position if you had tried clearing it previously.
If you've done all the troubleshooting I told ya then I dont know. You'll need to start trying things like the RAM and vid card in another system to make sure those work.
Then it'll be down to either being the mobo or CPU.