GIGABYTE GA-P35-DS3L (lots of reviews, seems good for my purposes)
Seagate Barracuda 7200.10  
e6550 (e8400 is so hard to find, and i figured it wont be a bottleneck for years)
mushkin 2GB ddr2 800 (30 bucks at my local fry's)
evga 8800 GTS 512 mb
old optical drives
 
throwing it all in a antec p180.  it'll be powered by a true power trio 550 watt.
 
so i have several questions.
1.  How high can i expect to push my e6550?  Certainly to e6750 speeds, no?
2. The Truepower Trio - good enough for this system?  What about if it is significantly overclocked?
3.  Will running games like Crysis on a 19 inch monitor be wasting some of the PC's power?
4.  How good is the mushkin ram?  Will it be a limiting factor in overclocking?

I don't think you should have problems at all unless you are significantly overclocking. A better HSF solution might be desired for OC'ing though.

looks great ...  
 
How about the VGA though? Why GTS? I think you can get either ATi HD3870 or NVIDIA 9600GT with less price and more or less same league of performance ...  
 
Agree that GTS is slightly better, but not that much ..  
 
Memory is fine I guess.
 
For your question on Crysis, I can say that you will have no power wasting Crysis is such power hungry maniac coming from the future to devastate any hardware we had  I'm using HD3870, 2GB CORSAIR DDR2 800, E6750 on X38 mobo and 19" monitor (1440 reso), and when it come down to Crysis I must lower my head down a li'l bit It still can manage high setting, but with some little lag (really rare though). However there are no other game that could make my system 'cry' like that *lolz.

1. 65nm c2d/c2q tops out at around 3.6ghz on air. With the best air cooler, that is. With the stock coola, it's about 3ghz. I'm talking about 24/7/365 stable operation.
 
2. The Trio 550w is plenty for that pc at stock. Once overclocked, you experience random errors like instant restarts if the psu isn't enough.
 
3. Crysis is the most demanding game. It can slow down the best gaming rig.
 
4. 800/2=400*7=2800 or 2.8ghz synchronously.
 
http://processorfinder.intel.com/d [...] spec=sla9x
 
IMO, if you're shooting for 3ghz or higher o/c, you should get an E2180 which has a multipler of 10. So 400*10=4000 or 4ghz. No way you can get that on air, but it'll be easy to reach 3ghz & over. Like so, 400*9=3.6ghz.
 
http://processorfinder.intel.com/d [...] spec=sla8y

not necessarily; the 2**0s tend to have an FSB wall, apparently somewhere around 430 or something... 3.6 is probably higher than most chips will hit

Will the e6550 pose an actual bottleneck to playing games like crysis?  will i need to overclock to make it playable?

No pc will run crysis at max (over 1600p) resolution & settings. Your pc can play the game with low to med settings. If you want to max things out in games for cheap, get a console like 360 or ps3.