Why do you need to be connected to install? That's fucking stupid. What if you are mass deploying and all of them accessing the internet at once will cause world chaos?
See, this is just you not understanding how to diagnose XP. There is a boot-up option menu called "Disable automatic restart." This is also an option in the System Properties dialog (Advanced, Startup and Recovery, Automatically Restart). I arm myself with WinDbg (free) and a full kernel dump (as opposed to a minidump, which is the default option for XP Home/Pro), and find out very quickly what the problem is. This is an example of your ignorance causing you to blame Windows as problematic as opposed to your driver. You can't determine which driver is the problem because you're not educated enough.
I realize you can disable it. I don't think I could read kernel dumps so eh?
Holy fucking shit. It's SO EASY.
Windbg - Open Crash Dump (find the file, usually Windows\MEMORY.DMP)
!analyze -v
It tells you the faulting module 98% of the time.
GFG
---
As for why you need to be connected for the install, it's to download dynamic updates. If you're mass-deploying you'd probably use the preinstallation environment or something similar.