Please suggest good mobo & components for non-game system

Hi all,
Looking at building or buying new system very soon. Weighing pros/cons of custom vs prebuilt, both in price & quality. Soooo many people complain about problems w/ new pre-built PCs.

Please share sage advice on what to stay away from & what TO consider on mobo brands / chipsets, & recommendations for solid, stable, reasonably priced ones? Advice about cheap components to avoid like power supplies, cheap fans in cases, etc? Specific brands / models suggestions would be great! I'm sure I'll be looking at either AMD 64 x2 (AM2) or I- C2D.

I don't need the latest, greatest, fastest high end equip, but generally don't buy junk either. Heard about mobos where it took the mfg a yr to fix the bugs (some never). I'm more interested in stability, durability, support & reasonable expansion than blazing speed or masses of features I won't use.

Couple of people suggested (for ex.) some Asus mobos around $100. Will any mobo in that $ range have "quality" components and not be buying a pile of headaches? Not complaining if $100 mobo is sufficient for a stable, durable system w/ decent expansion - just cautious. What about differences in "solid" capacitor mobos vs others?

Not really a gamer - would like to do light video editing (& not grow old doing it) & LOTS of multi-tasking. Time (meaning slow computing) is money. Want a system that WON'T be obsolete in 3 - 4 yrs.

A custom PC shop where a friend worked yrs ago did NOT like ECS mobos (back then). Sorta get the idea they're still not too great, but Fry's sells them CHEAP as combos.

Thank you for any help, guidance & suggestions.

Look at a motherboard with AMD(ATI) chipset 690. It offer cool and good performance integrated graphic.
The BIOSTAR TA690G AM2 seems to be a favorite, but Asus and Gigabyte has both good motherboard based on that chipset too.
Take the fastest X2 cpu you can and lot of RAM.