Brand new laptop nothing but vista woes.

A friend just got a brand new maybe 4days old laptop (Acer Aspire 5315) he called me over to set it up for his 18-wheeler and house so i just powered it up and ran through the windows bs (time date name that bs with Vista) well it seemed fine for the first day but its locking up on shut down where you got to hold the power to shut it down and plus on start up it locks at a black screen but if you hit the power and start it again and select start windows normal (Not the restore) it loads fine. Only thing i installed was a ATT Aircard By Sierra wireless its the USBconnect 881U. It worked at first but now it don't work when i connect it. It don't show up in the at&t Communication Manager and when you tell windows that you want to remove it it just sits there on the safely remove hardware window loading. theres nothing wrong with the card because i installed it on my tower and no problems at all but i'm running XP home SP2 I did not know if this is software, hardware or networking so i posted here so if its the wrong place please move it. could it be the laptop or Vista home basic or both? i was reading somewhere that some laptops have problems with the aircards because of wifi and bluetooth but from what i read they fixed that with the latest update. oh yea i did a restore back to factory so its like it was right out of the box and it is running fine so it has something to do with the aircard and its software anyone got a clue?

 

The software install is on the card its self when you first put in the card in the USB port it starts the install. The version on the card is 6.7.24.0 he just got it like 2weeks ago so you would think with the version listed on there site is dated 2/7/08 you would think thats it but on there site its listed as Version R2.4.0.1.1618 i'll download it and try it.

 

I downloaded the update 4times and each time it would not install saying something about not being a valid windows installer. BTW it has Vista SP1

 

Ok so i reinstalled it off the software on the aircard and it did the same thing this time i moved it to a different USB port after and vista says the USB device not recognized "One of the USB devices attached to this computer has malfunctioned and windows does not recognize it. for assistance in solving this problem click this message." anyone got a clue?

EDIT i forgot to say i tried to go ahead and put XP on it i always start with my XP pro disk because of the dos boot and well when i went to start the install got past the "Do you want to use recover" part and as soon as i got there setup said there was no hard drive and told me to hit F3 to exit. Whats up with that?