After reading way too many bash.org quotes, and
this one in particular, I thought an IRC friend was joking when he suggested I goto
http://www.bootdisk.com/ to aid in my recent laptop re-building. Well, he wasn't, the site exists and looks like it has a great collection of useful stuff, most notably disks prebuilt with universal CDROM drivers, and Windows Networking Drivers etc etc.
Now, if only I'd followed the URL *before* I selected "Yes" to delete the partition, and started down the road of doing things the harder way..
On an unrelated note, never buy firewalls from purple monkeys.