Pink, to repair windows xp, plug in the windows xp cd into the cd drive and reboot (the CD drive prioritized in the BIOS boot-sequence, of course). keep on hitting whatever key it asks you to hit and choose the 'repair' option whenever you are asked with one. however, it is also a slightly risky business - depending on your habit of computer operation tho. if your operating system resides in a separate partition while all the applications files (including the "My Documents" folder too) in another separate partition, like mine, then even if you have to wipe the entire system out, all you lose is your operating system and installed applications which can be reinstalled again. but if you have everything within a nutshell drive called "C:\", then repair attempts might fail in which case you are left with nothing but meaningless binary data (0s and 1s). for more computer-oriented people, there do exist software tools (some even free) which help to recover files from a formatted partition too. in such a case, some knowledge of indices, inodes and hard drive zoning MIGHT also be required - remember FBI guys recovering data from formatted drives - you can do that too ;). therefore, i was suggesting you to recover all the application files (like your word, excel documents, music, movies, pictures etc) before you set out for anything risky. and that is done by taking control of your machine with another operating system which does not need to be INSTALLED (means nothing is written to your local hard drive). just as you can boot a computer from a floppy drive (such as MS DOS in the good old days), there exist free Linux CDs or DVDs that run from a CD drive (some are compiled by especially targeting these type of scenes, so they are able to decipher even corrupt hard drives ). Such distributions provide the capabilities of a full-fledged operating system including mouse and internet operativity and so on (even beyond what Windows XP can offer). that means, you are looking inside your supposedly corrupt hard drive from what is EQUIVALENTLY another computer. Then, you can copy the files to a safe place and take any risks to repair your computer. Obviously, you have to look for other sources to download and burn the live linux CD. Hope i made it clear. Keep rolling...