I would second LordSmurf's assessment.
The Catalyst WDM [Check tool] is highly unreliable, those green check marks are unreliable.
The 9000 series cards came designed for DirectX 9, but were released with DirectX 8 drivers and code. The little "baggie" of [Collateral material revision X] contained a blue users guide and quickstart sheet along with the Catalyst driver disk and whatever bundles disk you got with it.
The [Collateral] kit was "revised" depending on both the specific "model" of 9600 you got, the 9600PRO, 9600, 9600XT and when it was actually produced. The later versions got an upgrade to DirectX 9 "after" Microsoft finally released DirectX 9. They had a lot of pre-release candidates back then and people just didn't release products that depended on "Beta" release code for their flagship products.
The Catalyst disk contained the Flash animation installer, which installed the drivers, test program and MMC. (at a "guess") The Tests were likely written for DirectX 8 (not DirectX 9) and would likely fail because Microsoft "re-imagined" the DirectX 9 api somewhat, removing and shuffling interfaces around in the libraries and inventing the term "deprecated" .. which meant.. "we broke this and we're not going to fix it". -- don't hold me to this.. but I (think) I installed MMC on Windows 2000 once while testing the ATI USB 2.0N capture device and [all] of those Tests came up check marked green.. but that's the only time I (think) I've ever seen it.
Before you get all (but Microsoft said... they promised..) simple fact is Microsoft wrote a lot of checks it couldn't cash back then and didn't care. So they broke stuff and put the blame on the third party developers.
Installing [creates] a lot of GUIDs and inserts them in the registry to "Refer" to the binaries it installs on the file system. Repeated installs and uninstalls and re-installs, creates more of these GUIDS. -- The idea of "uninstall" is quaint.. the developer is suppose to "tidy up" and remove everything manually and report back to the operating system when its done. People make mistakes, and often don't remove everything in their "uninstaller".. because uninstall is like a users guide.. its an after thought.. developed after the code is finished. And they may go back and update their code, and forget or don't have time to update the uninstall script.. time is money to them. (and why would you ever uninstall their perfect masterpiece?)
These orphaned GUIDs create problems when trying to run DirectX programs, they can point to binaries that don't exist in the file system.. because when you reinstalled, you used a later "version" of the driver or application and this old GUID has a higher priority or "ranking" than anything you just finished installing.
Same for moving from one version of DirectX to another, 8.x > 9.a > 9.b > 9.c
You can take two approaches:
1. Use a DirectX "filter manager" to try and make sure all the cataloged DirectX "pieces" are actually on the file system, and eject or remove the entries that are "bad".
Filmerit (free)
2. Version your install of Windows XP as one huge (single) application on a removable Thumb drive.
I use
Macrium Reflectd (free) which creates a bootable imaging tool with the drivers for your OS, and then backs it up to your USB device or other storage media in the system (a second hard drive). Its backup images are also backing up only "used" blocks and compresses the result.. so the backups are as small as they can be.. but if you need to mount them as virtual hard drives to fetch a file or two.. you can do that.
The
Corsair Flash Voyagers are perfect for this because not only are they durable and made of solid metal, but that also dissipates heat. But they also have a real SSD controller in the device, which is faster than plain unassisted "flash" on a USB stick. And they are USB3.0 not that an XP system usually has USB 3.0 but you can backup a lot of GBytes in just a few minutes over USB 3.0 or archive by copying the backup image to another computer with a larger hard drive very very fast.
Learning to separate your OS from your Desktop and Video data so that you only have to backup the OS partition that "matters" for reinstall helps save a lot of time.
It gives you a way to get back to an "exact" time and state of the XP OS while your trying out lots of different configurations.. backing the "whole thing" up instead of only turning on Windows "System Recovery" is much better. I recommend System Recovery, but it only safe guards a few thousand "special" windows files that Microsoft considered "important" plus any boot time drivers.. which (is Not enough) when your working with DirectX and applications that depend on DirectX.
PS. I'll try not to give a history lesson, but DirectX 8 was essentially for Windows 2000, DirectX 9 was essentially for Windows XP. Remember many of the ATI cards were written with Windows 95/98 support still in mind. Windows XP was brand new back in 2003 (only two years old) and still considered cutting Edge.. so some people held back and were still running Windows 2000. Until DirectX 9 was accepted and mainstream the tools were likely tested on Windows 2000 and DirectX 8. (if you really want a "fun" weekend try reinstalling Windows 2000 and DirectX 8 with MMC 8.x .. its a real trip, and not much fun)