XP SATA install MSI K8N Neo4

[mostholy]

am at the point of frustration and would appreciate any clever insights as to what I may have overlooked. I am building a new system from the following hardware:

MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum

AMD Athlon 64 3200

Corsair 2x512mb DDR400

Western Digital 120GB SATA HDD 7200rpm

Sony DVDRW

MSI GeForce 6600 PCIE 256mb DDR

Antec Smart Power 350W PS

Everything went together easily, but I am having a Dickens of a time getting XP to install. I have never used a SATA drive before and didn't anticipate such issues in getting it up and running. I found that both my old floppy drives are no longer functional so have tried slipstreaming the drivers onto the XP install discs (followed directions from a number of forums and think I have it right but not 100% sure). What I get when I try to install XP is it rolls along until it has drivers all set then I get a blue screen that says:

A problem has been detected and windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer.

Followed by statements saying I should scan for viruses and check the connection of any new drives. Okay, I don't think there's an issue with the connection to the hard drive, have SATA cable connected to mboard and SATA power cable connected to the drive as well (did not use the ATX power cable). I have tried connecting the drive to SATA1 (Nvidia controller) as well as SATA5 (Silicon Image controller) both with the same result. I don't think there's a connection issue because when I enable RAID, the RAID setup screen 'sees' the drive and I was able to format it from there.

What am I doing wrong? I have tried many combinations of bios settings: enabling/disabling RAID and such. I am at the point of doing something I promised myself I would never do again: buying a floppy drive and seeing if the drivers on the supplied floppies hold the key (the ones I slipstreamed I had downloaded from MSI).

Thanks.