I'll try this again. I set up a regular keyboard on the laptop.

I am reinstalling XP Pro because after a couple of attempts to repair the OS with the disk it stopped responding. I realized the advanced hardware on it was making it hang in that device installation stage, and then it wouldn't start up again when I had disconnected a lot of stuff. It was missing tons of files because it couldn't find or read SP2, and I downloaded and tried a fresh copy and it wouldn't use that either.

I've picked up Win 7 but it has to go in over XP to use this academic version, so I'm putting XP over the old install. I've been putting all of my files on a different drive letter, so while it won't be pretty, and there is a lot of stuff that I'll have to "own" or "claim" from this new setup, but it is there.

Ironically, I was preparing to run a big backup when all of this happened.

SRS