Vista Media Center problems and a solution

I've been meaning to build a Media Center PC for a while and have finally bitten the bullet and bought some components to add to a fairly old socket A Shuttle, which I happened to have lurking around.  I bought a Hauppauge WinTV HVR-1300 TV card and an ATI X1550 AGP graphics card to add to the machine, along with a copy of Vista Home Premium to provide me with Media Center.

Unfortunately I've been having some fairly serious problems getting the machine to run.  After assembling it and installing Vista on the machine, I found that loading the Hauppauge drivers for the TV card would cause the machine to hang (either immediately I started Media Center to try and set it up, or when the machine rebooted), or the device would not start (shown as a yellow triangle next to the component listed in Device Manager).  Which of these it did depended upon whether I had loaded the Via chipset drivers, ATI graphics card drivers etc.  Ultimately however, after more hours of mucking around with it than I had ever thought possible and installation of far more versions of the various drivers for the components within the machine than I have ever tried before I resigned myself to it being something of a lost cause.

I went back to have another look at the problem yesterday and borrowed an nVidia graphics card to try instead of the ATI one I had been using.  Following a rebuild of Vista, I installed the Via drivers for the motherboard, the graphics card drivers and then the Hauppauge drivers and the whole lot fired immediately into life with no problems.

So, it would appear that the ATI card I bought for the PC was causing the problems I was experiencing!

I'm not at all sure why I've had so many problems with this machine.  Installing the same components into an nForce2 based board for trial purposes seemed to work, so I guess that it might be a Via/ATI clash.