Here's the sad story so far:

I was trying to update a video driver for the ATI Mobility Radeon display adapted in my laptop. The new driver was obtained from the laptop manufacturer's site and is the correct driver (I verified this with ATI).

When attempting to install the driver, the installation process aborted with the message "Access is Denied". Unfortunately, the existing driver was corrupted, and all attempts to re-install the original driver or to "roll back" hve been unsuccessful (the XP restore point function is off).

I have all protection software (firewall, antivirus, spam blockers) off and disabled (after taking the system off-line, of course), all to no avail. ATI suggested a "tweaked" driver by an alternate organization (Omega) but I get the same install failure when trying to install the Omega variant.

The laptop is reverting to VGA and works fine, except that the scroll refresh is horribly slow, and worse, the DVD player won't work
Does anyone have any hints or suggestions, short of a scratch re-install

Thanks in advance for any help or suggestions offered.