I’ve reinstalled Debian, I felt there was a buildup of bloat on my previous system. While I did this, I moved the site over temporarily to one of my BOINC zombies. I resized my initial partition into the smallest size possible near the end of my drive. I resized the swap partition from an extravagant 3.8GB to a more logical 2GB. I made the rest of the drive another ext3 partition. During all the pre-reinstall tweaking I did, I adjusted the BIOS. I turned off all the onboard stuff except ethernet. I noticed the SiS onboard video card was sharing 32MB of my RAM, so I disabled that. Oops, no video. I had to go get a spare video card and use that. Nothing fancy, just an ATI Radeon LT. All it needed to do was text anway.
I then installed the system, checking Basic System and Web Server as the packages to install, because it seemed to have frozen when I tried SQL server as well. I installed a few basic packages such as lynx and bzip2, copied over the server log and configuration files, and set up the static LAN IP. After making sure the password protection for some server resources were intact, (they were) I pointed the router at the server again. It seems faster, which is everything I was looking for.