Vostro 1000 Resource Conflicts & 30 Token Ring Network Controllers

I've got a very strange problem with a friend's laptop...

Dell Vostro 1000, BIOS v2.6.1, Win XP Pro SP2, AMD Athlon X2 1.7GHz, 2 GB RAM

On Sunday he was looking up pythons on the internet and the first hit was the site for the Python programming language. He says he downloaded the program (compiler?) and installed it. After that, the screen stopped working. If he turned the laptop on, the fan came on for a bit, the lights flashed, but the screen did not come on at all.

On Monday, the screen came on, but there was a message at start up talking about a resource conflict with the PCI network controller on the motherboard (F1 to continue, F2 to setup, F3 to restart, etc.). When the Windows desktop came up, there were 30 new hardware notifications, all of them Token Ring Network Controllers (of course he didn't have drivers for these). He went ahead and tried to remove the Python compiler (thinking it was to blame), but it didn't show up in Add/Remove Programs, so he did a search for "python" and deleted all entries (not the smartest thing, I know).

Currently, the new hardware found notification comes up unless you disable the 30 Token Ring Network Controllers. The onboard LAN doesn't seem to exist, and neither does the card reader. Everything else seems to be fine. There were some strange entries in the Event Viewer, but nothing indicating what the problem could be. I'm stumped... I tried disabling the onboard LAN and it came with some different errors and the SD card reader re-appeared, but it wasn't quite right. I also ran a system restore to a point before Python was installed and nothing changed.

Is the Python thing just a bizarre coincidence? What would you recommend I do? I wish the Dell BIOS had more options... Does it sound like something is corrupted in the hardware?

Should I try updating the BIOS (new version 2.6.3 is out, not sure how safe it would be)?

I appreciate any help you can give.

Here's the exact message that appears at boot (there are 30 of these errors, and I can only see the last 4, so the Device ID varies).

Bus 08 Device 1B function 00
Error Resource Conflict PCI network controller on motherboard