You
really should use Lenny, especially if you are having video issues. Etch is about 2 years old already. Lenny is about to become the new stable. Really, you should probably grab a weekly build of the "testing" netinstall CD from here:
http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/
This will generally give you the best chance of successful auto-detection of hardware and autoconfiguration.
Unless this is a server or other mission-critical application, I'd suggest pointing your sources list to "testing" and just stick with that. It's not as bleeding edge as it sounds.