AMD Catalyst installed by its Install Mgr., and...that's it apparently  

Manually install the driver from device manager by selecting the .inf file of the driver

Device manager>Display adapter>Update driver software>Browse computer for driver software>Browse folder in which .inf is located

sa3, welcome to the forums.

There is a very good reason the latest catalyst drivers won't install for your card, there is no support for it in the drivers (that and the workstation drivers have always pretty much been separate from the regular drivers). Assuming the FireGL in your laptop is based on the desktop version of the V5200,

ATi RV530 GPU - Specifications, and Pictures - GPUReview.com

ATI relegated all cards (laptop, desktop and workstation) under the HD 2xxx series legacy status, and there hasn't been any support for any DX 9 based cards in the drivers since the Catalyst 9.3. About the best you're going to get is the last Vista driver for it,

ATI FireGL

No idea if it is newer than the one on your disk, or if it will even work with the laptop version of that card.

I can't believe this. I directed Device Mgr. to C:\ATI\Support\10-9_vista64_win7_64_dd\Packages\Drivers\Display\W76A_INF where there's both a C7104558.inf and a CH104558.inf, both dated 9/1/2010, and Windows 7 (fresh of a year old CD) still comes back at me with

The best driver software for your device is already installed

Windows has determined the driver software for your device is up to date.

Standard VGA Graphics Adapter

UPDATE: Okay I just read Stormy's post while I was replying to yowanvista (yowanvista, thanks for replying!) and I'll try out the earlier driver. Will post back. Thanks to you both.

I just tried the earlier one and...the same conditions as above.

Here's what happened on the last hard drive I had this OS installed on half a year ago: I tried what we're doing now, to no avail. But at one point the OS went and found what it needed over the Internet automatically, and then after that I had my Catalyst drivers by name in the Device Manager. I have no idea how it happened, because I had deliberately tried that auto-locate over the Internet resource several times prior to that, and it couldn't dig up anything.

But I still can't get either the auto-locate over Internet or the manual install to put a Catalyst driver, new or dated, onto my machine now.

Laptop video drivers (both ATI and Nvidia) have been problematic for a long time, mostly due to most laptop manufacturers not allowing the use of reference drivers with the result that there is no support for the those cards in the driver. A couple of reasons for this is the different screens and/or different power saving options they employ, with the laptop manufacturers adding support for the cards they used and modding various parts of the install files (but not the actual drivers themselves).

Too compound your problem, yours is a workstation variant which have always had a separate driver package from the regular desktop versions of the cards. One thing you can try is to use this,

Mobility Modder - ATI Version, Install the Latest Drivers on your ATI laptop

and modify the last XP/Vista driver (don't be thrown by it saying for XP, it is also the Vista driver),

ATI Catalyst

Just don't try it on the latest Catalyst suits as there is no support at all in the driver for the older DX 9 cards.

stormy, thank you very much for your considerable help on this. I didn't know about the modder site, and it looks useful for the future.

I decided to give automatic locate one two or three more tries before downloading and delving into Mobility Modder. And of course the same results, so then I thought to try just Googling around using FireGL and Windows 7 keywords to see if other people were meeting with success in some other way before committing to major driver surgery. I stumbled upon a sevenforums post that said he tried Windows Update, and then "Working like a dream now," he said.

I tried the same thing and there it was--Windows Update was waiting for me to approve a non-essential FireGL driver update. That was essential enough for me so I checked the box for it and then restarted the machine, and in the other poster's words, it's working like a dream now.

Thanks for everything again. I really appreciate all your generous help.