…..again. booted my xp pro laptop at home, and it just sat there after the login. no disk activity.nothing.tried safe mode.no good. tried repairing option.no good.tried re-install over the existing home.setup starts and sits their saying ’setup will complete in 39 minutes’.says that for more than a hour. no activity.
time to recap what happened at last reboot.windows did prompt that it had restored a corrupt registry setting from a backup, and the only button to respond with was ok.did that.i mean what else can you do.no info on what it did restore/repair.
hmm panic starts to build in. the data being lost (mostly my 717 picture library and music library). got hold of a iomega ion usb hdd-caddy. opened up the laptop to get my toshiba hdd out and saddle it up in the caddy. lo behold, the drive now comes up as a e: drive on my desktop [xp pro again 
]. anywyas, copied everything out the desktop and now in the middle of a clean new reinstall of xp pro (after a format). hope it goes well.
and yeah, i am at ’setup will complete in approximately 9 minutes’.
thanks to everyone who helped me out. you know who you are 