Dave...

After tedious hours of searching, my friend has managed to get 'almost' everything on this laptop working with XP. He gave me one of his laptops to work on (they're identical). The last of the issues appear to be with the sound and hotkeys.

I managed to get rid of all those pesky !'s in device manage under his sound devices. The last remaining problems are three unknown devices, all of which I've found to be related to windows hotkeys (by looking up the device ID's and use of PCwizard). The sound driver and codecs all appear to be functioning properly, but there is no audio coming out of the speakers. There is a media bar above the keyboard, with shortcuts to play, mute, skip > and <, as well as a few other general media shotcuts. All of these buttons are fully functional.

He said that he has contacted Gateway and they told him that they didn't offer any drivers for any devices on that laptop for XP and furthermore, it's impossible to run XP on that laptop. This is obviously a lie since every other component is working nicely.

I'm assuming that he'll just have to wait until someone unpacks the vista drivers for the sound device and rewrites them for XP... Any chance you're that guy?