The missing 256 MB memory is probably stolen by the onboard video; it may be possible to reduce this to a smaller amount via a BIOS setting. You might also try fiddling with any available ACPI settings, e.g. sleep states, etc. (IIRC my VIA Epia M had a setting for whether "sleep" meant S1 or S3.) And I kinda wonder if that unexplained 10-pin CN2 header might be a serial port? Although since it doesn't show up in dmesg, maybe not...
I was about to ask if the ACPI dump differed between PXE vs. hdd boot, but then I realized that was impossible to check given the crash. :-) If you could boot another OS from both hdd and PXE, maybe compare ACPI dumps to see if the BIOS changes something? Another workaround would be to 'boot -c' and disable acpi0, but that of course doesn't help fix the bug. -Andrew