Vista Tutorial - Crash on Media Center setup

My friends computer got some terrible virus, so we reformatted the hard drive and reinstalled Vista. Apparently his Gateway came with recovery disks, but I didn't know about them, and I figured it didn't matter anyway. So I reinstalled and downloaded all the drivers I needed, but Media Center still won't work. It crashes whenever I enter setup, either custom or express. No error message or anything, just a CTD. And Media Center is really the only reason he's even keeping the computer, so we really want to get it working. Any ideas?