I did hear back from Asus and they did say that the X79 Deluxe motherboard does support the Intel Management Engine, even though they do not specifically mention it in the specs. Also, the "ME" in bios which in my case says N/A is referring to the Management Engine. It is looking more and more like a hardware problem. Asus is finally sending me another motherboard.
I do get an error in device manager for PCI Simple Communications when I do a startup from a power off state. At the same time I get an error in device manager for the Intel 82579V Gigabit Network Connection. When I restart the computer, both errors go away??? So every morning, I have to start up the computer, then restart it before I can get a network connection.