My box when I boot it up has no video, including no bios or anything. Last time it was up i had a dialog box saying my ATI Radeon 9600 card had a catastrophic failure and froze. I rebooted the machine and thats when this happened, no video .. I tried replacing the video card in a different slot and that didnt work either...

All help is gr8tly appreciated...
James

You can never say this with certainty from a distance, especially with no information about the computer at all, but let me cite Dr. "Bones" McCoy: "It's dead, Jim". (Either the card or some stuff around it)

Do you have the little case speaker connected? Then you should hear a sequence of beep signals from your motherboard, telling you what goes wrong. 1x long and 2x short would indicate "video problem".
I'm puzzled by this:
I never saw a PCI-e 9600, only AGP - and there's only one AGP slot. Or do you have a rare model for the old PCI bus?