Premature again--thought I had the answers, but still little net progress. I can't seem to get far enough now either to safe boot or change startup disk back from 10.3 to 9.2.2 . Here are my notes on what transpired:
o Following Macworld's instructions, installed new 400 card, with full 512MB, top & bottom.
o Believe I brought it up in 9.2.2, but not sure. May have had to go past 9/extensions problem ("reboot, w/ shift key")
o Switched startup disk to 10.3 .
o Came up fine, reported 512MB main memory & 1MB L2 cache.
o Restart
o Blue shapes screen/background after "Network Initialization" window--frozen cursor, no response.
o Cmd-Ctrl-Power--same--several times restart & freeze. Pulled AC adaptor plug, battery stepped in, finally physically removed battery (Macworld or someone
does say remove battery first).
o Removed top 256MB, booted to 10.3 fine. But first time only, as before.
o My notes at this point say "change start disk to 10.3" so I'm not sure if there's an omission here or a repeat.
o Reboot
o Freezes after "Network Initialization" window.
o Ctrl-Cmd-Power
o Freezes same
o Ctrl-Cmd-Power, then Shift key
o Says "Safe boot"--& freezes just after dock & menu bar ["Finder"] appear.
o Ctrl-Cmd-Power, then shift--Same (TextEdit, via "Startup Items", appears in dock & starts to bounce, stops again in mid-bounce, system has frozen).
FWIW, the times I've been in 9.2.2,
(1) With the new card, I indeed got "Apple DVD Player" in the Apple menu, and
(2) Clicking it gets the response that an alias for "Apple DVD Player" and/or a disk called "untitled" cannot be found.
I also experimented with Extensions Manager. After the previously encountered "system error" and booting around extensions problems, I set "extensions: basic" and booted fine without the previous "system error." Oddly enough, though, I then set "extensions: all" and booted fine as well. Since then, as I say above, I haven't found a way back to 9.2.2 . I have not done your directions on resolving 9.x problems, beyond the immediately foregoing.
I've read parts of _Panther Bible, 9th Edition_ chapter "Troubleshooting Techniques" and indexed sections on "frozen Macs" but haven't found anything clearly useful.