Not especially. I have used the latest driverpacks and w/ the latest base (as of this post) without the chipset drivers and I don't find any problems. I have followed a few leads off of your post and others on the net but have been unable to resolve the issue. I am still getting lockups when I apply the chipset driverpack. The way around this has been to apply all driverpacks except for the chipset drivers and apply the intel chipset drivers offered via Windows Update after the initial windows installation.
I did try to exclude the intel drivers w/ the chipset driverpack and use my own packaged 3rd party driverpack with the drivers that I know work and I still had a lockup. I am wondering if another vendors drivers are conflicting w/ these. It seems odd but I am at a loss as to how to troubleshoot this.
There is still testing that I need to do to determine the true culprit in this scenario. However, I have about 300 of these desktops to deploy and a very tight timeline so I have opted just to carry out the installation and install the chipset drivers via a post-install script I wrote. It seems to work for my scenario.
I will try to keep you informed on my progress.
Drew