C2Q Q9400/Gigabyte EP45-UD3R OC Experience?

Hi all. I just started overclocking, and as you can gess I am having a few troubles. Last night I was able to get it to 3.2Ghz, with a 1.262Vcore. I ran Prime95 and everything, it was stable. Then, tonight, I tried decreasing the voltages gradually to see if I could save any energy. I decreased just the slightest, and it failed. So I kept it on there, then tried getting to 3.4. I see now that that was a bit of a big leap, and perhaps a little foolish, but I tried it. As soon as I did I was having problems galore, so that it took alot of restarting, and power on/off'ing to get into the bios. I then loaded back the default settings. Now, after exiting the bios, without changing really anything, it restarts itself three times, and in the bios it says there was a problem due to overclocking, yet I had it on its default settings! The weird thing is, I can get into windows fine, and I've been running prime 95 for 20 min which means there isn't actually an error. So I continued with my oc'ing, and now I'm back at 3.2Ghz, with a slightly higher Vcore. I still get that thing every time I exit the bios, where it restarts three times on its own, before getting into windows, but once its there, its there normally. Another weird thing is that in all of my stat reading programs, its showing up my vcore and clock speed totally wrong. The first thing I need to know, is if its safe for e to continue climbing my OC, and if anyone else has ever experienced these problems. Are there any settings I need to turn off in my bios? For someone with experience with this hardware, how far have they ever gotten t, and on what settings?