Is there only one good stick of memory on the planet?

[pg07143]

I have a machine that was blue screening consistently on boot. It is a Dell Dimension 4700 that has 2 X 256MB PC2-3200 RAM installed. I removed one of the sticks and the machine started working fine. I moved the working stick to each of the 3 memory slots and everything stayed stable. I advised the customer to upgrade memory and I bought 2 X 1GB PC2-5300 RAM (PNY). When I installed the new RAM, the machine started blue screening immediately. I ran individual memory tests on the new RAM and it fails miserably. I am doubtful that I got 2 bad sticks of memory, but ordered 2 more just to be sure.

One thing of interest that I noticed is that one of the capacitors near the RAM slots is slightly bulged at the top. I would totally expect a bad cap to cause this type of behavior, but the fact that the computer runs fine with one of old 256 sticks of memory makes my head hurt . Anybody out there have similar experiences?