That's a good point. I had problems with my hard disks in my new system when I put it together, and switching out the fancy round silver cables for the boring grey things that came with the mobo worked like a charm.

Although, I seem to remember having this problem before as well, and it wasn't related to the cables or anything (I think). My solution may have been to simply stop using one of the drives, althought that's not a very graceful one.

has anyone ever seen a situation where two drives on an IDE chain don't play nicelky together?

I don't remember seeing a situation where they did I hate the whole system.