Inspiron 1545 Missing Video Controller Driver and Driver Install Failures

My wife had a catastrophic failure of her laptop - could not be restored from restore partition nor using Windows Vista restore processes.

Have had to boot from Vista media to move key personal files off via DOS prompt to USB key.

Reinstalled Vista yesterday - seems ok but 2 key issues (Video driver and Windows Update):

- In Control Panel Device Manager there are two device errors one on Video Controller (error 10) under "Other" and a related one under the Video Adapter.

- The Video Adapter has no driver installed

- I tried installing all drivers recommended under my service tag - two Video ones relate to Digital TV mind so assumed only the Intel Chipset and ATI were relevant - note the later will not install (well the C++ redistributable part of it wont)

- A number of the recommended drivers won't install properly for some reason - in some cases this attempts a .NET Framework 3.5 install via Windows Update which doesn't appear to work (I've tried registering the dlls in command prompt) - then a manual install of 3.5 .NET fails too

Any help would be gratefully appreciated as the Video performance is pretty poor.  I'm still a bit worried about the health of the hard drive although it has come through a ChkDsk unscathed as part of Vista install I did yesterday.

Does any one have a list of the essential drivers that were originally installed and in what order they should be installed.  My next step is to reformat the hard drive and start a Vista install from a clean hard drive (I'll probably create a spare partition to do this)...  Am I wasting my time with Vista and should I try something open source instead - will this be less problematic?