The Hercules website is down and the card came with no software

Cute, looks like a DNS issue, I'm seeing a host not found message on this side for both their main site and support site.

ATI reference drivers crash Windows XP on bootup. Nice.

Cool, this means that ATI must be giving the manufacturers of their cards a wider allowence for making changes to the design. Every GeForce card I have seen works with the reference drivers from NVidia, meaning the only difference is the color of the PCB, and possibly the layout of the components. That to me is pointless compaired to NVidia just making their own boards.