My Problem: How to get the latest ATI Mobility drivers loaded and be able to tune performance.

I have an HP NX9420 notebook with a ATI Mobility Radeon X1600.

The problem begins with the HP provided Vista driver, their releases are at least six months to a year behind the most recent ATI release. If you try and install the ATI drivers you get an error telling you to download the latest driver from the manufacturer OR you get the CCC can't load error (no matter what you do).

Better still, if you install the HP provided driver in Server 2008 the CCC will still fail to load....and you have old crappy drivers.

This is how I fixed this:
First you need to get the latest drivers installed, you can do this with the help of this tool:
http://www.driverheaven.net/modtool.php

Follow the instructions on their site to modify the ATI installation process, this will trick the ATI installer into installing the latest Mobility driver for your card.

Install the driver only, no need to install the CCC (Catalyst Control Center). I have a better solution!

Next, you need a way to tweak your 3D settings for games, I stumbled upon this excellent little tool:
http://www.guru3d.com/article/ati-tray-tools-/

This is a small tray tool that tweaks all of the same 3D settings as the CCC and more.

I'm still testing this tool, but so far it works great. It completely replaces the CCC, no more memory hogging .NET application! No more errors!

Give it a try, if you find anything let us know.

better method.

Install CCC and latest drivers.

Go into device manager and uninstall the graphics card (do NOT check uninstall drivers).

Click on detect hardware changes, and your card will be reinstalled with the latest drivers.

Go into start menu, find CCC and click "restart runtime".

And now you have working drivers + CCC without third party tools