cant get abit IS7-E to work! please help

I've installed everything properly into the motherboard. the hard drive spins up, everything gets power but the monitor never gets initialized. my dad is currently using a P4 1.8 ghz CPU (not the northwood) and plans on upgrading soon.
Parts:
We're using pc 3200 ram in it (2 sticks of 256mb) and we're using an ATI Radeon 9000 pro video card. The hard drive is a western digital cavier 40gb. We also have an sb live 5.1 in there and a creative labs modem blaster 56k modem. also a linksys 10/100 ethernet card.

Things i've tried:
i've tried swapping out the cpu for my cpu and we still get a blank screen. i tried substituting the radeon for an old tnt2 ultra i had lying around, that didnt work. i tried putting the ram in different slots and that didnt work.

this is the first time we've ever had this problem, we're not exactly newbies at putting computers together but we just cant figure this one out. everything seems to be where it is supposed to be.

Are there any incompatibilities between the motherboard and the hardware i mentioned above?

please help, thanks a lot. any suggestions will be great.

Have you tried resetting the CMOS. I would try that. I also would try using just one stick of ram instead of trying 2.

yes, i tried resetting the CMOS and with 1 stick of ram

still no screen