Hardware installtion progress

Ive seen this problem before, and corrected by format/reinstall, but the customers PC I have now doesnt leave me that option, so anyway..........
Following a crash caused by the graphics card overheating as the fan had failed, the modem and sound card drivers went tits up. On reinstalling the drivers, the updating hardware progress bar takes about 30minutes to run. PC runs absolutely fine except for this (Athlon 1.0 Litre, 384 Mb). I can put up with the time, but as ive seen this a few times before, wondered if anyone else had encountered it and managed to get to the bottom of it.

You tried deleting the enum key in safe mode?

No, its only two devices playing up. If I del the enum key ill have to reinstall all hardware, and if that hasnt fixed it, then ill be forever reinstalling!!!
Im happy to wait for the two devices to load, but am just curious for future.

try deleting the wininit.ini