XP reinstall driver issues

I have been working on an aspire one d250 XP Home sp3 that was contaminated with viruses and a rootkit or 2. Can't seem to boot into the recovery partition so I am doing a complete reformat and reinstall, as creating a recovery disk from a contaminated system seemed useless. I am using the same OS and have downloaded the drivers for the correct model from the acer website.

Problem 1:
Obviously I was having issues installing in ahci mode, wouldn't recognize the hard drive and aborted the install. Changed AHCI to IDE on the bios and was able to reinstall fine. However after going through all the trouble to create an f6 floppy using the SATA drivers from acer v8.0.0.1039 I then discovered that the drivers contained there are intel matrix RAID drivers of no use for AHCI support. Tried other intel matrix AHCI drivers from the intel download center for the 945 mobile chipset family to no avail. This is annoying but i figured that the chipset drivers installed post OS would fix it.

Problem 2:
Installed all the drivers but the chipset driver, checked the device manager and the only driver listed under 'other' is the SMBus driver. No problem this driver is included in the intel chipset drivers 8.3.0.1018...
After installing the chipset drivers detailed above and rebooting the computer gets past post to the XP splash screen and crashes. Now I'm really annoyed!
Searched the intel download center looking for 945 mobile chipset drivers all give the same result or say the PC does not meet the minimum hardware requirements.
Tried slip streaming the f6 drivers described above. No AHCI support.
Tried slip streaming the intel chipset drivers. Still crashes after post. AAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGHHHH!

Someone throw me a bone here - why would an OEM post bunk drivers?

Anyone got any ideas.

 

What about installing system w/o providing "F6" drivers. I never heard anyone installing Acer drivers this way. Try to install full system first and drivers after that...

 

I second that, after getting a regular install working, use SysPrep to create the slipstreamed image...