Vista Tutorial - Hardware problems

OK call me crazy but does Vista do strange things with our hardware?
Recently I obtained the Vista CPP from microsoft and installed it on a Dual
core 3gig CPU with a nVidia 6600 (256meg) and 1gig ram, I even bought a
250gig HD to install it on. Every thing went ok but I needed to do some work
with WinXP so I put my 80gig HD with XP on it back into the PC, this is were
the fun starts.
WinXP will no longer recognise my video card or the dvd burner, I have tried
to reinstall the video drivers and the burner drivers but it still wont
recognise the components. I put the Vista drive back in and everything is OK
everything works. I have put the WinXP drive into another identical PC ( I
bought 2 identical PC's to stop arguments in the house but that's another
story) and everything works fine its only when I put the XP drive in the
Vista machine I have problems. As anyone else had these problems? Short of
buying new hardware just for XP is there anything I can do? OK Conspiracy
Theory #100000023400 does Vista somehow rewrite the bios's on the components
only to work with Vista:}

Adrian