Acer Aspire driver nightmare

I'm working on a laptop: Acer Aspire 5050-3242 WinXP Pro SP2. The Acer web site is useless; at least Acer-USA is useless, it wouldn't even load. I got a time out error. So I got most the drivers from Acer-Europe. Not a problem. They all loaded except for the modem driver and the eternally mysterious SMBus controller. The driver downloaded from Acer-Europe for the modem says failed to detect modem device. If I go thru the device manager, I get 'the sepcified location does not contain information about the device'. This may be due to a European phone thing being different from the US. I'm still trying to get the modem driver from Acer-USA. But what about the SMBus controller. It's not listed in the driver list, and there isn't a chipset driver either. I ran AIDA and Everest, and neither can give me a name for the chipset or SMBus controller. Any ideas? Anyone?

hopperdave2000

 

Ok- problem fixed. All drivers are now installed and working fine. But there's just some wierd stuff happening here. When I click Start and go to All Programs, the menu that comes up is VERY limited. And at the top of the start menu, instead of the blue IE 'e', there's a globe and it says 'Internet'. If I click it, it takes me to Internet Properties, where I can set my home page, etc. If I right click it, only 2 choices come up: Internet Properties and Remove from this list. Any ideas?

hopperdave2000

 

Start > Run > then type regsvr32 /i shell32.dll

Steve

 

Where did u get these drivers from I loaded XP pro and tryed there website drivers for the modem and SM Bus Controller but I'm not having any luck with these drivers or anyothers for that matter. If you can give me some insght on that it would be great