Hi Rooster,
It seems to me that if XP installed fine and you had no problems until you loaded up the mobo drivers that there is some issue going on there. These are the things I would try, update xp before installing any hardware drivers, then go to the web and get the lates drivers for anything else, I usally go for the video driver first then sound and so on. If the mobo drivers that you have down loaded still cause you a probelem I would take a look at the bios version and see about possibly flash updating that. Thats me though, some may be very uncomfortable flashing bios. I do it alot for all kinds of hardware and never had problems, just make sure you follow procedure and all should be well.
These are things I would try, maybe somone else can ad to that.
HTH