Nope, not really. What I said above (about 10.5.1 and your specific hardware) is apparently true... I have a Compaq V2000 series laptop (ATi radeon xpress 200, probably the SB400 chipset) and can get 10.5.1 partially running - but only by installing first to an external HD using another computer, then connecting the external HD to the laptop and booting from it. After MUCH effort (trying to install various .kexts (drivers)) I can get it into the OS X desktop. Even then, much of my laptop hardware is still NOT supported. Out of the box my disk drives aren't working properly and I don't think the AMD/ATi chipset is properly supported. Mine doesn't "loop" or stall like yours. It reaches a point where it just can't read from the optical drive and says "still waiting for root device" endlessly... I've been successful on 3 of the 8 computers I've tried to install Zephyroth on. My laptop was the biggest failure. OS X just doesn't work on every type of hardware.

So: "You're going to be doing a LOT of research and probably putting in a little more effort than usual to get it up and running on your hardware..."

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Running both 10.5.8 and 10.6.4 on my stinking AMD/ATi machine...