Spade Symbol During Startup

I am building a PC for a friend using older components and am having some strange problems. Using an MSI-6195 slot A board and an athlon 700MHz slot A processor the combination has caused me nothing but grief! I cant get an OS onto the system i have replaced the board once and its the same error - when booting from floppy it recognises the disk and "states starting windows 98" but will not go further and leaves an enter symbol in the place of the A prompt and crashes. The more fatel error which started occuring on the second board was there was a spade symbol next to the processor type and size when the bios recognises it, and spade symbols throughout the bios summary where it tells you which processor, pci gards, HDD etc you have. I take it the processor is not completely nackered otherwise the system would not boot but it does seem to be the root of the problem - any suggestions other than binning the processor and getting another??