Upgrading XP to W7 with GeForce 7600 Go causes crashes. HELP!

I'm not very tekkie, but I thought I could post on this site to see if Tom's braintrust could help. I tried to upgrade my HPdv9000t from XP Media Center to Windows 7 Home Premium. The custom install would go well initially but would eventually choke on the updates and give me the BSOD. I finally figured out that it was due to the graphics driver update. I have a GeForce 7600 Go, which is not upgradable unless I want to replace the entire motherboard. Scanning the messageboards I discovered that others were having similar issues last year. I tried downloading drivers directly from the nVidia's website. I tried laptopvideo2go.com. I tried installing Vista drivers. Nothing works. The messageboards also say that HP is not supporting upgrades to W7 for the old XP laptops. I can go without the nVidia driver, but I'm forced to use the generic VGA driver that doesn't support my native 1600x1000 display. Instead I have a lower resolution that stretches everything horizontally.

What's worse is that instead of backing up an image of my C drive I decided to rely on the recovery disks that came with my computer, which have failed spectacularly in restoring my laptop back to XP. The disks also modified the recovery partition which prevents me from recovering from there. My final attempt (since the XP disks weren't included with my laptop) was to download a XP Media Center ISO torrent, but when I pop it into the dvd drive I get an error message that it can't see any of my harddrives and so cannot install.

I'm at my wit's end. Any recommendations as to either (1) upgrading the nVidia driver so that I don't crash, or (2) reverting back to XP (either with the recovery disks or with the torrent version)?

Any advice would be much appreciated.