Zing, cheers for the info, mate
mr0161, here's my thoughts...
1. Depends a bit on your case. Some cases make it easy to add the mobo first as you have loads of space to manouver the drives, whereas others are so small and pokey that you need to do the drives first and then fiddle till you get the mobo in place. For what it's worth, my current case allows me to do the mobo first, then I do the PSU, followed by the drives.
2. If you go for the past, don't use an ear bud as you risk getting bits of fluff on your CPU die, and that would hinder the heat transfer. The good brands often include a small piece of plastic (kinda shaped like those hotel key cards) that you can use to smear the gunk across the CPU evenly. Otherwise, you can use your finger inside a small plastic sandwich bag to smear it across but don't just use your finger without the bag, cause you'll get oils from your skin (as well as dead skin cells) onto the die and this will make it less effective too.
3. Put the graphics card in before you boot up, otherwise you won't be able to see any messages on the screen
By default Windows will use a horrible default setting, but once you've installed the graphics card's driver you'll be able to increase the resolution and colour depth settings to suit your preference.
4. If this is a brand new install of Windows, then you won't have any old drivers to uninstall, so just install the latest drivers from your manufacturers website.
5. Yes, just like the memory slots.