Vista is a Douglas Adams S. Titanic in install

I guess I am on install attempt 10 or more now
To set the stage here the Vista Advisor found no issues
None

You get that

Clean Install on a blank Seagate 320 SATA drive (yeah yeah yeah, I kno
Vista seems to hate SATA drives) with an Upgrade Vista Business DVD

I started getting through the "Windows Loading," (that took som
interesting peripheral gymnastics, and a lot of time
I got through the hanging green and blue curtain (hung there once too,
But here is my favorite.....

The DVD drive that got me thus far
The one through which all was loaded and run
Vista asks for a driver for it

Ok, but NEC doesn't have drivers for the NEC 3550 A (its a plug an
play
Believe me I checked.
Vista offers no options of its own
in fact the "browse for a driver" comes up with a grey box with n
options, or buttons or text

So I can go back and forth between Vista having no suggestions, an
Browse to nowhere
You can't proceed, and there are no options

I reloaded XP Pro to make certain that the very latest firmware was o
the DVD drive and the newest BIOS is on the motherboard (an Inte
DG965SS running a Core 2 Duo CPU) even though both are absolutely bran
spanking new

Now I am using the XP Pro disk to reformat the SATA drive so I can mak
yet one more Quixotic attept to clean install this deeply flawed animal

Why do I need to be so reliant on XP to make any headway whatsoeve
with a clean install on Vista
Like that makes sense

Any ideas or encouragement would be helpful.
I am feeling like the money and time invested in Vista was probably on
of the lousiest ideas I've had in 2007 at this point

At least on Adam's Starship Titanic you could wander around and hea
Terry Jones voice amidst the pointlessness. :

* * * * * * *

"at the heart of our galaxy, an advanced civilization of which we kno
nothing has built the biggest, most beautiful starship ever: th
starship titanic. On its maiden voyage, the biggest, most beautiful
most technologically advanced interstellar Etherliner ever buil
unexpectedly crashes. Into your house.

--
Frenchtrails