Thanks, Roger! I'll try the air duster tonight.
I was also thinking of folding a sheet of paper around the stick of memory in order to polish the contacts in the slot. A couple of insertions should be enough to burnish any oxide.

Meanwhile, the thing doesn't run too bad on 128MB.
I'm still loading, tweaking, and setting things up.

Mark- the ease of Linux setup that you describe is very compelling, especially in light of the fact that I'm still searching for monitor drivers so I can get off 16-color 800x600 (D'oh!).