Quote - When I did a clean install of Win7 I only had to find a single driver myself for my soundcard which is getting a bit long in the tooth, everything else just worked straight away with no problems.

Yeah, well beware of that. The MS drivers are just generic crap for the most part. For example, it may say that it loaded your Nvidia/ATI graphics driver and even list the correct model number, but it's little more than a replacement for the old standard, generic VGA driver and most definitely won't be current.
Motherboard drivers, audio and video drivers, and everything else should be installed from the manufacturer, where available.