An update for my problem:
I got Windows Setup to go pretty far without using drivers. The thing that happened was I was getting random errors in random parts during the setup, however. I believe the main problem is interruptions / IRQ. What it came down to was that I got to the part where you have to restart the computer and the main part of the setup begins, but it never does begin for me. I kept getting a BSOD as soon as it booted from CD, so I just gave up and zero-filled my hard-drive. *NOTE: I think I even got that far because I changed the MPS in BIOS to 1.1, instead of 1.4.*
After this, I tried running Knoppix (for all of you who don't know, it's a version of Linux that can just run off of the CD, without a hard-drive). After several attempts, I got it to run pretty stably, but here's what it kept saying while booting:
BIOS bug, IO-APIC#1 ID2 is already used!
... fixing up to 1 (tell your hw vendor)
... MP-BIOS bug: 8254 timer not corrected to IO-APIC
PCI: Cannot allocate resource region 2 of device 05:00.0 [not sure if that's the correct number after the 05:00., but probably]
PCI: Cannot allocate resource region 0 of device 05:00.1 [not sure if that's the correct number after the 05:00., but probably]
Now, after turning of APIC in BIOS, all the bugs up to the PCI ones dissappeared. Apparently, this is an IRQ problem.
Can someone please recommend some actions that I should take? Right now, I'm quite tired, but I'm going to try a couple of things tomorrow (03/02/05) to see what happens - taking out the DVD-ROM and DVD-RW drives one-by-one, and then I would like to flash my BIOS. Can someone thus please just briefly describe how I could flash the BIOS safely without Windows? Should I do that Alt-F2 thing at start-up with a floppy in my floppy drive with the .bin file for the new BIOS version? Also, should I use version 2.0 or the newever beta one (0203 or something like that)?
Any help is greatly appreciated and much needed. Thank you!