is it my Abit VT7 motherboard or Windows XP

About a month ago I decided to wipe my machine and everything seemed to be going fine until had only left to install the AC'97 audio driver even then everything seemed to be going according to plan besides the message about the driver not having the right signature, since I had just downloaded the newest version from the manufactures website I figured what the hell and continued anyway... so now the computer was copying the files and then returned with the message that a problem had occurred during the installation process, that the data was invalid and that the multimedia card was not installed, an true enough it wasn’t.
Needles to tell you about Murphy ’s Law… I tried quite a few times in different ways and with different driver versions to get the problem salved, including trying to find the driver on the Win XP Pro CD (Here comes the fun part) until the CD literally exploded in the CD drive, which by the way got jammed and damaged in the process, the drive was replaceable and was up and running again in a matter of minutes. Since I’m not rich and Win XP Pro is not cheap I do no longer own a Windows XP CD
Before this it was running Windows 2K pro and every thing was working fine with just the standard audio drivers.

If anyone has any ideas on how i get theis thing worked out I'de love to hear from you.

Check that you installed the latest chipset drivers first, then install the audio.

Thanks, I'll try that again... still hoping it will work this time

Ok so I tryed reinstalling all the mainboard and chipset drivers and everything went fine, untill... the sound card drivers did not get installed, just like before.

Thanks anyway.

What's new is that I got some other pci-soundcard from anoter machine also punning the excact same version of Win XP where it was working fine and... same thing.
however I then tryed re installing it into the other machine and it is still working fine,

I've run out of ideas on whar could trigger this to happen.