Problem with Intel 82852 driver (X40, WinXP Pro)

[mikeyboy]

A few days ago, I noticed that my video was somewhat sluggish, and video clips weren't quite playing correctly. I somehow ended up trying to upgrade my graphics drivers to 6.14.10.4497, which is the "final" version. I removed my old drivers and did a standard install only to get "Unknown error. Setup will now exit".

I tried this a couple times, no luck. So I try to go back and install the drivers by manually updating them (pointing Windows to the drivers through the Device Manager). Now I get "An error has occurred during the installation of the device. Access is denied."

I have done this several times with new, old, and in between version of the drivers. Now I cannot install any kind of drivers, and I am stuck with the default Windows VGA adapter (which I think I may have been stuck with before).

I have already tried the following:
- Using Driver Cleaner to remove any files from system32 that the intel drivers may use, and manually removing those files
- Changing the registry permissions so that I have full control of HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE and all of its subkeys
- Resetting permissions for windows\system32 and windows\inf so that no files are read-only
- Replacing windows\driver cache\drivers.cab with the original from my Windows installation
- Checking the Intel setup program's installation log, and telling it to force overwrite. The installation log is useless and says the same thing - "An unknown error"

I have run out of things to do (I probably did those things 2-3 times each). Any clue what could be denying access to installation?