I thought these things were totally outdated, but apparently not. They have saved my ass twice in the past week, both during Windows installs. I guess the real problem is that the XP installer is 5 years old, and doesn’t have any modern drivers.
Microsoft should really release setup disks with updated drivers once in a while. Especially if the product is going to last 5 years as their flagship desktop.
And in case anyone was wondering, to create a driver disk that you can use during windows setup, all you need to do is copy the .inf, .sys and related files for a driver onto a floppy. It apparently doesn’t require any kind of special layout on the disk.