Yes, the firewall and IDE drivers are what I'm referring to with the nForce. Even the nForce 2 IDE/RAID was a chore to get working on Vista/7, you had to use the XP drivers to get it working, period, as the built in IDE drivers wouldn't detect any drives in setup. That and nVidia got rid of SoundStorm, which was a decent on board DAC solution.
EPIC RANT FOLLOWS
While the Athlon was clearly whipping Netburst left and right in terms of performance, the horrible chipsets kept me well away from it. Its one of the reasons I stuck with my 440BX P3 machine for so long. This machine is actually the first AMD acquisition from this era of hardware (I had a Socket 423 Dell Dim8100 that went to uxwbill which oddly enough I also got from the same friend this Athlon came from).
I had to support these machines when they were new (I was a PC repair tech from mid-1998 to mid-2005). They were nothing but headaches. There would be what we techs called "transient running issues". Basically odd random behavior and crashing that we couldn't reliably reproduce or isolate with hardware swapping. Think of the problems caused by bad RAM, but the RAM tested out fine and known good RAM was swapped in as well! The above Athlon system even played tricks on me last night. It started BSODing on boot. I was going to blame nVidia's fine video drivers (I have stories about nVidia and their XP drivers too), but it then eventually stopped booting with the long-short-short beep code. It just randomly stopped detecting the video card! Re-seating the video card didn't fix the problem, but kicking the machine in a mild rage persuaded it to work again. EDIT, RacoonRider might understand what I'm talking about right now.
While the Netburst P4 machines would cook eggs idling on a Windows desktop and lacked "teh snappy", they were usually stable (outside of the boards that had cap failures, of which there were many). Pretty much everyone used Intel chip sets in their P4 machines, which helped. Any time I see VIA, I have flashbacks of 4-in-1 driver hell. If only the customers knew what we had to do to get their beloved computer to consistently work right!