For motherboards, I've had good luck with ASUS, Abit, Iwill and Epox, for either Athlon or P4. Get one of the better ones if you want more life from it. 4x or 8x agp, plenty of memory space, good chipset.
Don't scrimp on the RAM. Get good quality ram from crucial, corsair, mushkin, etc. They tend to use top of the line chips, and they are much more reliable, and not all that much more expensive. Get 512M minimum, get 1G if you can afford it.
For IDE hard drive, get a Maxtor, or Western Digital (I prefer Maxtor, had the best luck with them overall). Higher rpm and lower seek times are best. Get the biggest one you can afford, you'll find you always need the space
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For a video card, ATI or Nvidia are your best choices, especially if you're into gaming. If you use Window FX, you should probably get an ATI, as they seem to work better than the Nvidia. Unless you want a top of the line gaming PC, buy a card about 2 levels below the very top of the line card. Your performance will be more than acceptable, and the cost savings will be significant.
For sound, get an Audigy or Turtle beach, for gaming and general sound. If you want audio quality, get an M-Audio or one of the better audiophile cards (often a bit more expensive, though).
For a DVD drive, any good name should be fine. I've had no trouble with any of the more well know names. Can't speak for a dvd burner, never used one.
For a CD burner, I've had good luck with Lite-On and Yamaha (I have both currently, and they're both excellent and reliable).
I haven't found any brands specifically to stay away from (apart from the obviously cheap). For good examples of good baseline systems, check out the systems guides at ars-technica: http://arstechnica.com/guide/system/index.html
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