I think what you mean is this: back when this device was made and sold, floppy drives were the "in" thing. So manufacturers created a self-extacting exe file that demanded you insert a blank floppy disk in your floppy drive and when it extracted, it wrote those installation files to floppy disk. You then used that floppy disk to do the actual installation. Now that floppy drives are not the "in" thing, it makes the install file almost useless.
The only thing I can suggest is to take the contents of the floppy disk and write them to some media that your Latitude is capable of reading, eg: usb stick or cd-r disk. Or have a friend upload the files to some hosting site like rapidshare so you can get online and download the file(s) to your pc hard drive. or have the friend burn the install files to a cd-r disk so you can read/install them from your hard drive or cd-rom drive.
You can take a look at the 3Com website... perhaps they have a driver that doesn't require to be expanded to a floppy disk.
http://support.3com.com/infodeli/too...6c/drivers.htm