I think I had 2 days of headaches before I realized I needed to slow down and pay attention. I'll adress some issues -

Drivers: If he gets Windows XP, he'll be fine. Most drivers for any devices he chooses to connect will be installed during Windows installation. Those that wont, should come with a drivers disk. If he swaps ANY hardware from his old setup to the new, theres about 90% chance that Windows will have the correct driver for it.

RAM: Dunno about you, but I've not used DDR since it came out, and my system still runs fine. Do I need 1 gig of DDR or 512? Hardly, I'm not doing video editing or the like. I cant imagine any gamer running into any memory issues above 512 SDRAM. If they are - I'd love to play this game that uses so much memory for its textures and applications.

I have an XP 1600, and it has hardly been crippled by SDRAM and a Hard Drive running at 2mb buffer. There isn't any kind of noticable slowdown in games or otherwise. Files and folders open as quickly as usual, and copying chunks of files from one area to the next is the same. Bigger is of course better in principle, but not neccesarily needed.

The things I suggest save money, and still provide an above average functionality for someone looking to build another system, and pinch some pennies.