hmmm, i had a very similar problem with a laptop that came with winME.
i installed win98 on it and half the stuff wouldn't work, and the rest needed a lot of tinkering to get the drivers going properly. I installed win2000 on it, and i couldn't even open the control panels to install a driver to make the screen display more than 16 colours. installed winME again, worked almost too easily. Only 10 minutes of driver hopping and all works as well as it can with WinME.
Seriously, for odd hardware support, maybe you should try out one of the spanking new linux distributions, specifically red hat 7.2 or possibly mqndrake 8.2
they develop faster than windows, and may well support your laptop components. On the other hand, Linux is free, so try it, and if it doesn't work for you, you are no worse off...