Only thing people should feel bad for is wasting their time providing help to someone who doesn't want it.
Lol, you know it doesn't matter. Someone else with the same or similar problems will google and read through the thread and appreciate the help. I spent quite a bit of time when Windows 7 was in preview and first released helping mainly people with AMD/ATI graphics. I'd modify the inf files and upload them, post links right on Microsoft's support site. A person never hears but a lot of my uploads were downloaded thousands of time. The driver team at AMD are also dedicated and work hard at customer support. I seen when searching the windows update site they had two updates in January alone for chipset drivers that as far as I could tell were about as old as his chipset, quite possibly for his. In fact the solution may have been as easy as to right click in the SATA controller in device manager and do an automatic search for an update. Take care and good luck.