swapping pre-installed Vista for XP

I have an Acer Aspire L3600 mini PC, a great little second PC but for the
fact that it came with Vista Home Premium pre-installed in a "hidden" part
of 'D'. It has a built in facility where 'C' can be wiped completely clean
and restored to its factory default condition, data etc on 'D' hopefully
being untouched.

I don't like Vista much and would prefer to install my full retail version
of Win XP on this PC. I don't mind giving up Vista completely.

Acer's support is OK as far as it goes but they make it clear that they do
NOT recommend this course of action ,saying that they do not support
downgrading the unit with anything other than what came pre-installed on the
machine. They warn of the risk of "product failure".

If the 'downgrade ' to Win XP can technically be done I'm willing to take
the risk but need a bit more help on the mechanics of doing it. I have
installed OSs on other PCs from scratch but this process, i.e. totally
removing a pre-installed OS which is in some hidden and protected part of
the hard drive, appears to be rather more involved and I'm way out of my
comfort zone! I need help and advice.

Acer say that to run XP I will need to create a bootable disk with SATA
drivers otherwise Windows will not detect the hard drive when the CD is run.
I think I've tracked these down on their download site, at least in the
driver download section these were the only ones to show up.

What's come up are a total of 6 for Chipset, Audio, Lan, Modem, VGA and
Wireless Lan. Each one is in a zipped folder.

Out of interest I compared these to the drivers listed for the pre-installed
version of Vista. The chipset version number is identical to the XP version
but the others have different version numbers and there is a additional TV
driver for Vista Home Premium (the L3600 is media centre enabled).

So,

1. Are these 6 drivers in fact the SATA drivers Acer are referring to?

2. How do I create the bootable disk they refer to. When I've installed
an OS in the past I've used a floppy which was inserted early during the
install process when prompted to do so. I don't recall there being
6 separate drivers though.
I have an external floppy disk drive and wonder whether this could be
used in this case? If not can anyone tell me how to do it and what the
procedure is when installing XP.

3. Is the removal of the pre-installed material simply a question of
formatting the entire hard drive? I thought of abandoning the idea of
having two partitions, 'C' and 'D' and, on this PC, using external drives
for all data storage.

4. Is there anything else of which I should be aware?

Regards,

Bill