Well, after a month of periodic rooting around Dell's drivers I finally have the Latitude back in full service. The website will eventually (grudgingly) locate drivers for you, but when you find a dozen driver files the website still makes you download them one at a time.
Ironically the driver I had the most trouble with was the one for the laptop's Ethernet card. One of Dell's "Quickset" utilities configured the laptop to turn off the card when the laptop was on battery and then the driver file was corrupted. It wouldn't "roll back" or reinstall. The card refused to talk to the laptop until I started all over again with a fresh WinXP installation (minus "Quickset") and Dell's latest Latitude NIC driver. Since the laptop wouldn't go online I was burning driver files to CDs on the desktop and trying them out on the laptop.
For those who don't get as much entertainment value from Dell's "support" as I did, it's probably well worth the $40-$50 hassle to download a recovery/driver CD from resellers like this one: Homepage of Genner Sales Downloads (Windows Recovery CD downloads & Windows Restore CD downloads)
Ironically the driver I had the most trouble with was the one for the laptop's Ethernet card. One of Dell's "Quickset" utilities configured the laptop to turn off the card when the laptop was on battery and then the driver file was corrupted. It wouldn't "roll back" or reinstall. The card refused to talk to the laptop until I started all over again with a fresh WinXP installation (minus "Quickset") and Dell's latest Latitude NIC driver. Since the laptop wouldn't go online I was burning driver files to CDs on the desktop and trying them out on the laptop.
For those who don't get as much entertainment value from Dell's "support" as I did, it's probably well worth the $40-$50 hassle to download a recovery/driver CD from resellers like this one: Homepage of Genner Sales Downloads (Windows Recovery CD downloads & Windows Restore CD downloads)