I had this exact same problem when I was on holidays and I got my new laptop. Installing XP didn't work so I tried a whole range of different things, most of them somehow revolving around the preinstalled environment of Vista's install disk. (Desperately trying SOMEHOW to make winnt32.exe run without the compatibility problems of running it on Vista). At one stage I thought of nLiting every single driver I had on my computer...which took a while so I kinda gave up. When I got home I had a bit of a google and it turned out that was basically what I had to do all along...if only I looked that up BEFORE I went on a 4 week holiday.
/ 
