Hi Dave Briggs Apologies for not threading - just read the posts on the archive.
First - hopefully you are using MDV2006 and not an earlier version and especially not one of the magazine cover disks that appear from time to time. Because of the lead-in time before publication they are always outdated and in some cases have had various packages added and removed randomly. If you cannot d/l a recent version then email me.
1. Internet connectivity on your linux box - you really do need this for any distro in order to install updates as well as new packages.
Can you use ICS (Internet Connection Sharing) on the windows computer and connect your mandriva box to it with ethernet? I've done this in the past with no problem - that was pre-XP though so things may have changed e.g. not sure if XP-home has ICS - it seems to lack most things that are useful.
2. easyurpmi - hopefully you have googled for this by now but if not, here is a brief intro.
urpmi is the mandriva command-line utility for installing rpm packages. It has the major advantage of handling dependencies unlike classic 'rpm' as well as several others. The Software Installer in MCC (Mandriva Control Center) is a GUI front-end to this and other utilities - generally slower than command-line (of course) but has many useful sorting functions, information about all files and file-locations to be installed etc etc.
easyurpmi is a website (group of mirrored websites) that make setting-up the sources for apps very easy. You just put in your system details (processor, distro version, repository types required etc) and then copy/paste the output into a root command line terminal. Try 'man urpmi' for more info.
http://easyurpmi.zarb.org is the place to go.
You need as a basic minimum update-source, main, contrib, plf-free and plf-nonfree.
You can then disable the CD/DVD installation media (in MCC) if you wish as main contains more packages than fit onto the DVD/CDs. php-xml may be an example of this.
I would suggest installins update-source first and installing all the updates. Even on dial-up it can be done overnight.
plf will let you install stuff that enables encrypted-dvd reading and many other non-free multi-media formats that make the jolly old inter-web such a joy to use (heh...).
plf are now hosting repositories for ubuntu as well.
3. php-xml is on the devel (aka 'community') mirrors in 'main' and may well be on the 'official' branch of the main tree.
In fact many people, myself included, use the devel (aka 'community' in MDV2006 although not in earlier versions) repositories instead of the so-called 'official' sources (hopelessly confusing naming conventions BTW). Despite its name, devel contains the most recent and (generally) stable versions.
If you do this then you do not need a seaparate 'update-source' and you will need rregularly to update all sources and install updates from the command line as root: urpmi.update -a; urpmi --auto-select
4. Then there is 'cooker' which is the stuff actually in the process of being developed - not for general use. It's the same structure that debian uses of course.
5. There are many other repositories of rpms built for mandriva although reports of how stable they are vary widely. 'Seer of Souls' (yeah, really) has a good reputation at present although I don't use it myself but does offer things like KDE3.5 etc that mandriva has not yet incorporated. google will find it for you if you want to give it a whirl - and selecting/deselecting repository sources in MCC is very quick and easy.
6. Look in the boot section of MCC - you should be able to set the options to login your user and start X from there if they were reset when you changed the graphics driver.
Hope this helps. Feel free to email me off-list if you prefer.
Syd