Background:

I have recently upgraded my hardware because the previous Pentium system started failing to the point that it would not run long enough to boot. It was obviously a hardware fault, but I had no way of knowing whether it was in the motherboard, CPU or memory. Not all the components were now available, so I decided to replace all three.

In order to get some benefit from the expenditure, I though I would put in faster components, and for future-proofing went for recently released ones: MSI Z87-G41-PCMate and Intel i3-4130 with 4400 HD graphics.

The system performs excellently with Ubuntu 13.10, so I know there are no hardware problems, but I need to continue running XP because it runs several thousand pounds (UK) worth of software, which meets my needs more than adequately: in some cases there is no longer support for later Windows releases, and in most others an expensive and to me unnecessary upgrade is required.

Problem:

The motherboard specifications claim Windows XP support for the live driver update utility, which misled me into believing that XP drivers were available. Not true: Intel have apparently refused to provide XP drivers for Haswell chips. The update program runs on XP, but finds no suitable Intel drivers.

The system is more or less running on the default fail-safe VGA driver, but DirectX will not load, which stops a number of my applications from running. I have been trawling the internet for a month now, but I have not found a graphics driver which will load successfully: all show "This device cannot start. (code 10)".

I don't need HDMI support: my monitor is 1280x1024 and connected through the VGA port, so all I need is a driver which will handle this resolution well enough to support DirectX. Has anyone found a driver which will do this?

Please don't reply with information found from internet searches, unless you have actually solved this problem: be assured that I have been all round the houses looking at solutions which others have reported as working, but none of them does for me.

Incidentally, I did find an Intel HD sound driver which XP accepts (winxp_145111.exe from Intel), though without connecting to an HDMI port on a TV or sound system I have no idea if it works in practice. However, the graphics section of the same driver fails, like all the others I've tried.