linderman

I know of one way to overcome your issue; but its somewhat severe



you could run SYSPREP it will remove all drivers from the windows operating system / then upon restart it will set-up all your hardware just like it was the first time windows has ever been run

at that point you will need to reinstall all system drivers that windows doesnt take care of / look in the device manager after re-boot

it wont mess with your data or programs

you will need to reinstall your windows updates

make sure that floppy drive is not connected upon the first reboot after sysprep has been executed and the sysprep reseal has been activated.

here is the "how-to" rather easy actually!

Sysprep
First let me describe what Sysprep is, and why it's useful to us. Sysprep is a tool used in creating HDD images for mass deployment, where the hardware can vary from machine to machine. The general idea is, you setup a PC, install all the software you want, make all the setting changes to the OS and applications. Then run Sysprep, which will remove all hardware IDs from the OS. At this point, you would want to create an image of the machine, but we are not creating images for mass deployment. I am just outlining what the tool does, we will be using it differently.

The next time the PC boots it will run a Mini-Setup Wizard and re-detect your hardware just like the first time Windows was installed. You can setup the image to have drivers ready for your different hardware, but that ins't necessary for what we are doing. We are only deploying this to a single PC, yours, and you can download the drivers by hand yourself.

Now lets go into the actual process.

1. Download drivers for your motherboard and especially your network card. When you blow away your current setup it's nice to have these ready to install. The network card is essential, you mush have this driver handy in case XP doesn't. Otherwise you will be downloading from another PC just so you can get on the internet.

2. Extract the Sysprep 2.0 files from your XP CD (\support\tools\deploy.cab) to c:\sysprep. The deploy.cab can be downloaded here.
I'm not sure if Sysprep 2.0 works on Windows 2K, I assume so (have not tested this). I know Sysprep 1.1 does work, that can be downloaded here.

3. Run Sysprep.exe

4. Select Mini-Setup, PnP, and then Reseal. Your PC should shut down when complete.

5. Boot the machine, it will show screens similar to when XP was first installed, this is the Mini-Setup Wizard.

6. At this point the instructions will vary depending on your hardware, you will be prompted for drivers that Windows does not already have.

7. Once you have installed the drivers you are ready to go.