all that you did was take the long way of resetting the pram. All you had to do is hold the cuda reset button for about 30 seconds and it would have done the same thing that taking it apart for 48 hours did. and another way is to hold r-p-option-command as soon as you hear the start sound (but that is if it would go that far to where the screen would come on).I'm the proud owner of a Lime iMac 333, manufactured in May 1999, which i've had since June 2000, although it was nearly new, before i had it it had only been owned by an AppleCentre and it had hardly been used.
Overall, its been a fantastic machine, and most of the parts on it, including the power supply, analog board, CRT and CD-ROM drive are all the originals. However, in January 2003, one day i went to use it and it wouldn't power on. Thankfully i managed to fix it by resetting the CUDA and replacing the nearly-dead PRAM battery. in April 2003 i had a problem with the cage part that goes above the CPU card rusting out. At about the same time this happened the 64MB SO-DIMM i had in the top slot died, and therefore i'm led to believe that a bit of rust fell on the module and shorted it when power was next applied. I'm lucky it only fell on the 64MB module.
After replacing that with the stock 32MB module, everything went smoothly until November 2004 when i attempted an upgrade from 10.2 to 10.3. The install went FUBAR about halfway through and this somehow managed to FUBARize up the Mac's Open Firmware, which was the cause for my dislike of Open Firmware based Macs. Thankfully i managed to get it going again by stripping the machine and leaving the bare logic board to sit for 48 hours without anything connected.
After that everything went smoothly until August 2006 when i went to power it up and nothing happened. No fan, no LED, no raster, no audio. Nothing. I opened it up and had a look. I have absolutely no idea how this happened, but somehow my 128MB SO-DIMM had died, and had somehow also managed to take out the SLOT it was also in, leaving me with only one working RAM slot, with a 32MB SO-DIMM. Due to the fact that i unfortunately have the extreme displeasure of living in HickVille™ where Mac stuff is rarer than hens teeth, i had no choice but to leave the machine for dead until April 2007 when I went on a holiday to Sydney. After figuring my way out of the very big and very busy airport and setting myself up at the hostel i went around to Microseconds and bought a replacment CPU and mobo (my mobo was fine but i thought i better get another one just in case, and instead of just selling me a bare mobo, they actually just sold me the entire mobo/mass storage tray assembly minus CD-ROM and HD), as well as 2 128MB SO-DIMMs for AU$110 all up. When i got home i installed it all in my iMac, and did an OS 9 install, followed by a Jaguar install on a new HD i had gotten for free. Although the Jaguar install was unsuccessful, i put in the 40GB HD i had in the iMac before it died, and it successfully booted Jaguar. Since then i've been using my iMac as my main machine like i was before it died and its been compeltely trouble-free.
On slot loading iMacs, i'm sorry but they are total crap. I did work experience at an AASP for a while and every weeek we usually had one come in, usually for heat-related problems. Dead CRTs. Dead APV boards. Dead mobos, Dead Down convertor boards. They may be fine in other countries, but these machines simply can't handle an Australian summer well at all. I know i wouldn't even think about getting one unless i had A/C. I don't even see what the problem is with having a fan anyway...my tray load iMac has a fan, as everyone knows, and its whisper quiet...all you hear is a gentle hum, which is nothing compared to my Dell Pentium 4, with its 4 cooling fans, which sounds like a Boeing 747 taking off.
but your way worked just as good as if you was to hold the cuda reset button. i have seen pram battery's get low enough to mess up the booting even tho the time hasnt reset at all.
but back on toppic
the only problem i have seen from the new world iMac's is the flyback frying or the analog board fragging. i myself dont like the iMac's cause there is such a small upgrade path for them. i like expandability more so than a design of a case. my uncle has a bondi blue iMac tray loader 266mhz. the case is very easy to mess up when you are getting into it to work on it. the cd drive will not read burnt media and to replace that with a burner or something else so you can read burnt media is a PITA cause it uses a laptop optical drive