I had a user who had that problem, and it definitely was a stumper. In his case, the problem was that the nic's were either not properly getting an interrupt or memory resources. The solution was to upgrade his vid driver to the nvidia reference drivers.
We narrowed it down to a resource problem, since he was able to take out that nic and install it fine in another XP box. As well, he took the working nic out of the duplicate XP box and when he went to install on the original, received the same data error message.
It might help to troubleshoot by finding what interrupt, memory resources are being allocated, and if it's sharing with something else.
Hope this helps.