Replacing a Motherboard on a Vista x64 PC

Recently I had to replace my motherboard on my Vista desktop PC. After
connecting all the hardware and making BIOS adjustments, I started the PC.
After POST, the Vista loading screen appeared briefly and was slighly
blurred, as if the screen had not finished resolving, then a blue-screen
message appeared for a split second before the PC rebooted automatically. I
tried booting in safe mode, but the system loaded about two pages of files,
stopped and automatically rebooted. I booted from the install disc and tried
System Repair several times; the last time it told me that Repair could not
fix the problem. Is there anything else I can try before I have to do a
clean reinstall of Vista? I plan to try safe mode again so that I can
disable the auto reboot option and read my blue-screen message, but I'm
hoping that there's a way that I can avoid reinstalling all of my
applications (yes, I'm an idiot for not backing up my system before this
happened). Any help will be greatly appreciated.