And what a spectacular failure that was.. BSOD on boot-up, couldn't do anything but go back to the command prompt. Real nice.
Good news: WinXP will let you shoot yourself in the foot if you do it through a command prompt.
Bad news: I shot myself in the foot. :)
okay, so the file was incompatible.. it was a long-shot anyway. At least I was able to replace it, though! And, I thought to make a backup beforehand if anything went wrong, go me! back to driver hunting...