This will be the ninth re install of XP in a month! It's not like my hardware is out of date, it's all the latest and greatest, but every damn time I boot from cold, I end up having to rebuild the registry using the console, just to get in. Every f**king time! I've narrowed it down to my sound card, a Creative SB Live! and their lack of decent drivers. I was okay a few months back, everything was working fine then I made the mistake of trying to update the drivers and bang...it's been screwed ever since.
I came up with a brilliant idea of taking an image of the HD after I had the essentials installed and then it would be a snap to re image to hard drive, but nope the image was corrupt right from the get go.
I like XP, but this is starting to get irratating. I'm contemplating going back to 2000. At least I could boot into the OS without 15 minutes of work first!
Oh well, that's my rant for the day. If any of you have intelligent ideas as to why XP keeps coming up with the error messages as described in MS article Q307545, Windows XP could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: \WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM, I'll buy you a beer!

It's not XP that's the problem it's the drivers like you said. Can you do a driver roll back? Do you have a system snapshot from before the driver installation?

Although, SP3 for Win2K is pretty nice.

I tried to roll back the driver, but no luck. I took an image using Drive Image 2002 after installing XP, updating using Windows Update and installing Office 2000 Small Business, but found that the registry was already corrupt at that point. It's gotten to the point were I've made batch text files stored in my root of C: that I can run from the console to replace the registry with the one out of the WINDOWS\REPAIR folder!
A snapshot works, but I have to go back to the first one after the install, so then Windows doesn't recognize all my apps. What a pain!
I like XP Pro, the stability of 2000 with the compatibility of 98, so I don't want to change OS's. Maybe it's time for a new soundcard instead.

<font color=skyblue>Creative Labs released a new drivers download two weeks ago exclusively for XP.
I don't guess that would help, would it?
I dunno, since I still use the ancient Win'98'SE</font>

Haven't tried those ones, but the last ones they had posted on their site were a complete joke! I would imagine that most people don't have a problem with their XP drivers, I'm guessing my SB Live! isn't playing nice with another piece of hardware and that's whats giving me grief, although Device Manager is telling me everythings tickety boo.
Perhaps I'll give those new drivers a shot first, before buying a new soundcard. Not that they're overly expensive, but a soundcard is pretty much a soundcard. Audigy has a lot fluff, but I think most people wouldn't be able to tell the difference between a Live!, Audigy, or Santa Cruz.

Haven't tried those ones, but the last ones they had posted on their site were a complete joke! I would imagine that most people don't have a problem with their XP drivers, I'm guessing my SB Live! isn't playing nice with another piece of hardware and that's whats giving me grief, although Device Manager is telling me everythings tickety boo.
Perhaps I'll give those new drivers a shot first, before buying a new soundcard. Not that they're overly expensive, but a soundcard is pretty much a soundcard. Audigy has a lot fluff, but I think most people wouldn't be able to tell the difference between a Live!, Audigy, or Santa Cruz.</font>[/QUOTE]Creative is notorious for not playing nice with VIA chipsets. Had an audigy platinum but I dumped it for a Hercules Game Theater XP because of some compatibility issues and I haven't looked back since. I take it you've tried the obvious - removing the driver files and then re-installing a different driver version?

Yup, tried everything short of a sledgehammer! I'm going to give Creative's new Driver pack a try, but I think I should nuke and pave first, just to eliminate any references to previous drivers. If that doesn't work, I'll be ripping out the Live! and taking my cutting torch to it. Game Theatre you say? If memory serves that has quite a decent break out box right? How do you find it, sound wise? I've got a 5gig mp3 collection and a set of 4.1 Klipsch speakers. My music is important to me.

An update:

If anyone else is having this problem here's some more information:

http://www.onlineinstitute.com/windo...sages/107.html

There's quite a bit of information here on at is well:

http://www.tek-tips.com/gviewthread....779/qid/324755

Wish me luck!