Hardware Compatible with XP Media Center 2005

Didn't get a hit on Search "Media Center 2005" so here goes.

My goal is building a Media Center 2005 system (since the prepackaged ones are overpriced Junk).

Got OEM copy of MC05, ASUS A8V Deluxe Mobo, AMD3800+, 1GB of tasty HyperX RAM 3500, 300GB of Maxtor SATA with 16MB of drive cache for fast I/O, Radeon AIW9800 Pro for Graphics and TV tuner, Sony DRU710A... basically a pretty tasty rig ... 3DM03 outta the box is 5992... haven't done any OC'ing yet...

When checking websites (after purchase/installation naturally!) I discovered that there are no ATI AIW 9800 drivers for Media Center... argh!!! contacted ATI support and their answer was:

"Currently no AIW or TV Wonder card is MCE 2005 compatible.
You would need a standard Radeon Card and an eHome Wonder. This would require an AGP slot and PCI slot for expansion. The eHome Wonder is currently only sold to registerd system builders with ATI.

The TV Wonder Elite is a retail product you will be able to use with MCE but it is not yet available. It should be available near the end of first quarter 2005.

MCE requires a hardware MPEG encoder and all current AIW and TV Wonder retail cards are software."

To their credit, they answered my question with 2 hours!

But... ATI says I can't buy an "eHome Wonder", yet I see it available online everywhere!? And they say ATI AIW 9800 ain't supported!!! thats $200 out the window possibly?

Questions:

1) Can I in fact buy an eHome Wonder online (e.g. at NewEgg, etc...)? and make it work with a standard supported Video card?

2) if #1 is "yes", could I just use the AIW 9800+ as a fairly high performance video card (not use the tuner stuff) and use the eHome Wonder as the tuner, etc.?

3) anyone recommend any OTHER TV Tuner compatible with MC2005 and any specific Video card(s) (hopefully AIW9800+ in non-TV mode!)

Anyone actually built one? I promise to share all my experiences.

I've built two systems from scratch: one a High-end Intel system with dual SATA Raid arrays (one RAID 0 and one RAID 1); so I can handle some complexity.

Thanks in advance

TheWags