AMD's drivers have always been notoriously bad, boot into safe mode before installing.
I always hear this, but my experiences have been pretty awesome. Only one bug and it was fixed the next driver release.
The drivers aren't bad - why people still say that is likely because the installer looked like crap. It still looks bad, and there are plenty of issues installing drivers for older ATi hardware, but current AMD videocards tend to work well...though there are sometimes still installer problems
People equate driver tweaking UI == driver