Drivers!!!!

Damn! For the second time in 1 month I have had the hardest time installing drivers in windows xp!!! Earlier this month I "downgraded" a laptop for my gf's cuz from vista to xp. I installed xp and slipstreamed sp3 with the install and went to install drivers after that, aside from the ati radeon xpress 200m needing to be manually installed with a modified INF file. I had one heck of a time installing the modem and sound drivers. I need the ms uaa bus for hd audio driver installed first, kb888111 I think, but in sp3 it would not install, turns out I had to extract the compressed. Kb*.exe. And. Install the uaa driver manually. Then install sound and modem drivers. 7 hours of hair pulling fun that was to figure out, thank goodness for Google. Any way it’s all working now. Now tonight was another driver issue. With xp sp2 and a sprint 597 compass USB air card. Apparently. The install crashed/died half way. Some components were setup, others were not and still sitting in unknown devices. My co worker Jackson (props to Jackson) was working on it and he was there late, so I grabbed the laptop from him to see if I could help( he seemed frustrated after several hours of trying to get the card to install and was threatening harm against the laptop). I took the laptop and removed all drivers/software related to the card, and tried a fresh install of the driver (they install auto from a storage onboard the air card). Every time the msi installer would fail and the drivers would not be setup. After about 1 hour of this I figured id take the manual approach. After search trough the files extracted from the msi (that failed every time!). I found a folder with drivers for the air card. Io manually pointed every unknown device to this folder and let it select the best driver...... Viola... All the drivers for the air card began to install. But it took. 3 -4 hours and 2 techs to get it going..... Wow..... And people bitch about drivers on Linux!!! - could be that I am just an idiot and made something very easy into something very difficult...... But. Jackson def. knows what he doing so go figure.