I'm going with seating as well. I might say it was an incompatability between the two types of ram you have, but you stated you only had the new ram in.
Do you have windows software firewall turned on? I don't know if you can set it to deny ping requests or not. Also, you may want to try bypassing your firewall completely.
Nice name...lol My name is chris campbell as well. I've had that happen before when I was formatting a drive. In my experience it's always been a drive going bad
The solid state stuff coming in the near future will overtake the HD's of today. I think you'll see it first in the notebook market. Don't be surprised by how quickly it gets here.