<sigh> Bad RAM BIOS Flash

Hey guys, sorry in advance for the long post...it's been a long couple of weeks...

Last Thursday (exactly one day after being awoken by an earthquake) I awoke to see my computer showing me the dreaded "BIOS Checksum Error" message. I tried re-flashing the chip to no avail, eventually ponying up the dough for a new mobo.

I installed the new motherboard (ASUS M2N-SLI Deluxe) and it POSTed with no problems, but it stopped painfully short of loading vista, freezing at the microsoft logo. After exhausting all options trying to repair my installation, I ended up reinstalling windows and starting over with a clean slate.

Everything worked fine for nearly a week until I started noticing that certain textures were missing in my games. Soon afterwards, I started getting random errors like "Superfetch has stopped responding." Then I started experiencing random game crashes. Finally, I decided to run a comprehensive error check on the hard drive on which my games are installed. It had reached about 89 percent when I got a BSOD having to do with a nonpaged area.

My first instinct was that the hard drive had failed, but I decided to look up the error and found out that it usually has to do with bad RAM. I ran memtest and got tons of errors, so I checked the RAM configuration and realized that this particular motherboard wants paired RAM to go in alternating slots (i.e. slots 1 and 3 go together) and I had mistakenly put my matching pairs in adjacent slots (i.e. slots 1 and 2). I fixed this issue and still got errors in memtest (BSOD actually).

I then tried checking each stick of RAM separately and, lo and behold, one of them was bad. After removing the culprit, I haven't seen any more error messages or BSODs. I'm in the RMA process for the RAM, but I've still got a couple questions...

1) Is it possible that a recent BIOS flash with bad RAM ruined my previous motherboard?

2)Considering I reinstalled windows and other software while using this bad RAM, can I trust that the data on my hard drives is valid or is there a chance my files are also corrupt?

3)Any ideas as to what my have caused the stick to go bad? I'm running at a modest 5% overclock in a case with a ridiculous amount of cooling, so heat is not an issue.

System Specs:

AMD Athlon64 x2 5200+
ASUS M2N-SLI Deluxe
2 x eVGA GeForce 8800GS in SLI
Sound Blaster Audigy2 Value
PC Power & Cooling 650W Power Supply
3 x SATA HDD, 1 x PATA HDD, 1 x PATA Pioneer 112D DVD-RW
Antec 900 Case
Windows Vista Home Premium x64