This was a "new" board that David popped in when I had a bad audio chip. It was either refurbished or had a little preventitive work done to it.

It would have been a preventative measure. Once I got fed up of players coming in for problems with the IDE cables and headers, every player that came in for service (and every replacement board) had the IDE pins resoldered and the drive cable replaced whether they looked like they needed it or not.