And I have machines here that won't boot from an XP disk.
They work just fine with various Linux distros, though, including (to my own surprise) the latest Ubuntu experimental release (9.04).

And when the installers actually work as designed, the XP one really sucks for hardware support.

Big deal.

EDIT: And what's all of that got to do with this thread, anyway? Remember.. it's all about a multi-day effort to re-install XP on a machine where it once had been working, apparently. And is no longer, and appears to be unlikely to again. Unless a huge amount of money is paid out for permission to do so once again.

Thus the suggestion of a quite reasonable alternative to spending one's way out of a sticky mess.

Cheers