Vista Ultimate 32 bit Upgrade Problems

Last night I tried an upgrade over XP Pro. After about two hours of waiting I finally got to the language screen. Another two hours of copying, expanding, etc. it finally got to the finishing installation part. Then the Starting Vista for the first time screen with the dots running below it. I hear my Audigy 4 start to kick in and then an endless series of re-boots, at least 10. Finally error messages pertaining to Nvidia drivers. I'm running an Nforce 4 Ultra board and a 6600 graphics card. I have the latest BIOS, drivers, etc. I also have a Creative sound card which people say us a problem in itself. Any ideas welcomed. PS I also realize a clean install may be my best choice but WTF I figured MS's latest and greatest could save me some re-installation problems later on. Been doing this since DOS and Windows 3.1 and finally ran into a stumper.

Actually this was an upgrade done over a clean install. As far as old apps go the oldest is Flt Sim 2001 and everything else is newer and legal. Spybot, Ad aware, Adobe reader 8, Nero7, etc. After the unsuccessful upgrade try I did a rollback to XP which worked perfectly. I did notice in Windows Explorer the remnants of what appeared to be 2 attempts at an installation. I remember that when I did a clean install of Vista on my Core 2 Duo rig the process was so quick that I thought I missed the part where you were told to remove the media from the CD. At that part during a reboot of Win 95 and up I would hit the BIOS and have the rig boot from the HD. I don't recall seeing that with Vista ( pushing 60 yrs old now) so perhaps someone could steer me in the correct direction w/ that. I'm not adverse to a clean install or a dual boot either. And DeeDee I also have my Dos and Win floppies too. Thanks all.

Went with the clean install and everything is OK. Just have to bring over my documents, pix, and music from my external backup drive. Thanks all for your help.