Gateway M460 - Frustrating problem that I need help with...

I have a laptop that is a few years old that is frustrating the crap out of me with its "issues".

I am more familiar with trouble shooting desktop problems and am hoping some one can provide some tips or suggestions...

Gateway M460 laptop

Issues:

Random freezing in Windows (sometimes it runs for hours and sometimes only minutes).
Occasionally will not boot up. Power light comes on but lcd doesn't and hard drive light just comes on for a few seconds. Sometimes have to remove battery and power cord for a few minutes before it will boot up.

What I have tried:

Running on battery only - still happens
Running on power cord only - still happens
Taking one of two sticks of memory out - still happens
Switching out the other stick of memory - still happens
Running memtest on both sticks of ram over night - no errors found (and this seems to rule out over heating).
Updating video driver
Updating wireless and Ethernet drivers
Flashing to most recent bios version
Changing bios settings (not too many even available to change)
Formatting drive and reloading Windows XP (3 times actually)
Scanned for viruses (none found)
Removed wireless card - still happens

Any suggestions? I am hoping it is not the motherboard but it is looking more and more like a possibility. Could a bad hard drive cause these issues?

Thanks for the recommendation. Are there any illustrations on how to do this?

Well, I finally figured out what the cause of the problems is....

It is the video driver (Intel 915 GM). It appears to wreak havoc on the other device drivers.

If I uninstall the device drivers for the video and just let Windows use the generic ones then no issues at all (and the other missing device drivers automatically install).

If I re-enable the driver and reboot - all of a sudden the wireless doesn't work and other random device drivers are missing - (wireless driver, cardbus controller...) and randomly the laptop won't start up.

I did try updating to the latest video driver but still had the same issues.

If properly installed, there are 2 instances of the video drivers in Device Manager (this is normal from what I read). If I uninstall the 2nd one, my system is more stable but uninstalling both of them makes the system very stable.

Thanks, but I already loaded that one. The system seems pretty stable....as long as I do not add or change any hardware or settings that have to do with hardware.

I made the mistake of changing the wireless settings on the wireless card from being controlled by the program that came with the wireless card to letting Windows control it and it again screwed up the resources and other devices started having missing drivers, freezing....

It just seems like this laptop can't properly allocate the resources when hardware is added/changed.

Yep, tried that too. It is like there are only so many drivers that can be installed and any changes after that makes drivers that already were set up disappear.

This one is the most frustrating pc/laptop issue that I have ever ran into. I have thought several times that I figured out the problem - but I don't think it is any one piece of hardware (except maybe the motherboard).