I don't want to (completely) hijack the thread, but my brother's notebook is crashing at some access violation on a bluescreen very soon after booting into XP. He doesn't recall having installed any applications or doing anything to the system that would have cuased this. It's possible it happened after an automatic system update though.

Can this patch (mentioned above) be installed while running in Safe Mode? I'm not sure if he can get into Safe Mode, but I'm just worried the system won't otherwise stay up long enough to get it installed. After it crashes, Windows will usually want to check the disks on a reboot, which makes the whole process of restarting painfully slow.