[Grimmwor]

LavaPool,

The regrettable truth is that I was unable to find a solution to my (our??) little problem, and I spent ALOT of time researching it! I recently read somewhere (a column in last months PC World magazine?) the theory that Windows has a half-life, and with each release since the original Windows DOS extension back in 1983, that half-life has been extended just a little bit. Did you know that when you shell out that $200 bucks for windows xp what you are actually buying is a half-life extension? LOL! I believe with XP we are up to a half-life of about 9 months.

I am of course kidding, but I found that article to be very amusing, and had read it right about the time I was having that dynamic link library problem, and it had in fact been just about 9 or 10 months since I put this pc together and installed a nice, new hot of the presses copy of WinXP Home Ed.

As much as it pains me to say it, in the end, I did find the advice presented by Mr. Loosechippings to be my only option. I even took it a step further. I had been thinking about picking up a second hard drive for some time now (for more storage space), and found this to be the perfect excuse to do so. I bought my new hard drive (a WD 80gig special edition with 8MB cache, the same one I already have in my pc; it's a good drive, and I recommend it) along with a pci controller board, installed them, and got to work. I began by applying a fresh install of windows to the new hard drive. Once I had accomplished that, I added the old hard drive (with the unbootable windows partition). Having done this, I was able to access all of the files on the old hard drive. I methodically went through and copied all the data that I wanted to salvage to a new directory on the new hard. I then used some partition management software called Paragon Partition Manager to completely erase and reformat the old hard drive, and then created three new partitions: a 3gig swapfile partition, a 60gig software installation partition, and a 17gig partition for Linux. I also partitioned the new hard drive into two logical partitions. In the end, I was left with a windows environment with a 15gig C drive for windows xp and a full windows xp backup (did you know that you can enable XP Pros backup feature on Home edition? unfortunately, i didn't find out until after going through all of this!), a 65gig D drive for data, music files, movie files, software downloads, etc, etc, a 3gig P drive for my windows swapfile (which is on a separate physical hard drive from windows), and a 60gig S drive for all of my software installs.

This setup is working beautifully for me, and I have an environment from which I can recover from just about any disaster.

Anyway, good luck with your problem. I think your best bet is to do a Repair install (which, it is worth mentioning, is NOT technically what I did; I did a complete new install on a new hard drive).

Regards,