Help with RAID 0

I recently set up a RAID 0 array on my new computer. I'm running Windows XP Home SP2. My motherboard supports RAID and I just used the drivers that came with it. My array is not nearly as fast as I expected it to be. And there is some strange behavior, such as Windows not shutting down completely, I have to manually do it while it says "Windows is shutting down."
Should I have used a different driver? Did I miss a step while setting it up? Should I have gotten a RAID controller card for PCI or PCI-Express x1? Any advice is appreciated.

Here are my specs:

Abit AN8 motherboard
2x 74 gig WD Raptors with a 16k stripe size and formatted in NTFS
A64 3200
2x 1 gig Corsair performance RAM
Radeon x850xt
And a 500w power source

It booted fine every time when I was using the outdated driver. It only started doing it after I reinstalled with the new driver. Something else that I found very awkward is that the boot time seemed normal when I had a third hard drive hooked up so I could transfer some stuff to my newly formatted array. After I removed the third hard drive is when the slow boot up problem started.

Edit: Just thought I'd add this in there... Is a 16k stripe size good or bad for a gaming computer?