O.K. some followup on my journey:
With the awesome assistance of Pmdsp I was able to get OSX up and running.
Ended up having one bad memory stick (1 of 4 gb). Removed all but one, hoping to not use the offending one and the install went pretty smooth with pmdsp's help.
When I updated to 10.8.2 lost audio. Again with pmdsp's suggestion, reinstalled applehda.kext and all was well with both my external speakers and youtube videos not playing.
Last night I was running Mem86+ to find the offending stick. I found it and only placed the 3 good ones in the motherboard.
Now unfortunately I lost audio again and youtube videos are not playing. Most say unavailable and the ones that are available play for 11 seconds and stop. Audio settings say no output device available. I removed one stick just to keep it even but that doesn't make a difference. Thought I would give it a shot though. Ran kextbeast with the applehda and appleacpiplatform on my desktop but this doesn't fix the problem this time.