Please help with laptop drivers!! Impossible to find!?

It's an eMachines M2350 laptop. I was upgrading the OS for a friend and they requested that I do a clean install and format the hdd. So I did. Well now I can't find the modem or sound card driver for the life of me! It was a pain just to find the ethernet drivers, but now I've been searching the web all over in vain. The eMachines website drivers don't even run when double clicked!? Customer support was this... "try this driver, here's a link to this driver, wait... how about this one, did that one... no, this one... wait, have you tried this one yet?" NO JOKE!! I used SiSoft Sandra to figure out that it's an Agere Systems AC'97 Modem, but windows won't recognize it at all. Same for the sound, it's recognized as a ALi Audio Accelerator WDM, but no drivers work!? The default driver installs, but then the game port has an exclamation mark on it and there is no sound. By chance does anyone here have the resource cd for it? Or anyone solved this problem before? PLEASE HELP!!

The drivers linked from this page,

http://www.emachines.com/support/product_support.html?cat=Notebooks&subcat=M-Series&model=M2350

are normal zip files. After unzipping, and I mean actually unzipping, not just browsing around in the zip file with windows, rather extracting them all to a folder, it is a normal, even noobified driver installation with a Setup.exe to run. I ran it, then backed out, because this system needs not that driver (but it seems to work fine as far as I took it).

If only it were that easy... The eMachines website was the first place I went. It downloaded fine, extrated fine, started the install fine... BUT... when it was almost done it gave me this error message...

SEVERE "Driver not found! Reboot and run setup again"

SO.. here I am still soundless...

Ok then, now proceed to manual sound driver installation mode. (I assume you did install the board chipset driver already, right?).

unzip that sound driver from the emachines' site.
In it, in the relative path:

\Smaxwdm\W2k_xp\

THAT is where the driver files are. Go into Device Manager and on your unidentified or otherwise non-working sound card, in it's properties choose to update the driver and then browse to the above folder (wherever you unzipped it to), where it should pick up on the smwdmali.inf file.

All the manufacturers do this, really, so it's not just Emachine's fault.

Honestly, I haven't had many issues with Emachines... once you identify the hardware (I look on the chips themseleves) it's easy enough to use driverguide.com to get the right ones. It may take a few tries, but it's not that bad.