I finally found the source of my problem
It's unbelievable how sometimes little things can make you go crazy for days...
Running out of ideas about how to solve my problem, I decided to review the entire procedure of installinf my hardware.
And then I found out that the jumper of my 2nd hard drive was not correctly set (I've mistaken the settings of the Quantum drive with the settings of the Maxtor...). So, I just put the jumper at the right place, went in the BIOS to see if all my settings were right, reboot, and everything went fine. No more freezing at the boot screen, no more resets for hours before booting correctly. It is all fine now.
I know I should have check the jumpers long before, but I was sure that I did things the right way.
So, guys, if one day you have a freezing boot screen problem, don't do like me, and check your jumpers settings and your hardware configuration before asking yourself what is wrong with the damn latest driver you just installed 🙂
Finally, I would like to thank dejav00 and dijital for their wonderful suggestions of deleting system files and throwing away the new hardware I just bought. Just to let you know my config, in my humble opinion, is more than fine and fast enough to boot XP in less than 15 seconds, including the POST.
Now, I can install all of my softwares, make a ghost image of my partition, and never have to ear about software or hardware problems 🙂
Thanks to Rodep for his help and kindness.
Cheers.