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It would be the restore CD that came with the PC. If not, you can use your OEM XP CD, and reinstall Windows. Do not reformat the drive, or all of your saved documents, Internet shortcuts, etc. will go bye-bye. Your registry will be overwritten, so you'll have to reinstall several programs, but it beats losing everything on there.

It sounds like you have serious problems on your hard disk. It could be missing files, virus or corrupted Windows files.

Try starting it with your XP PRO CD and running the repair option.

If that doesn’t work, pull the hard disk and install a new one. Format and install windows. Reinstall your software and run updates from MS website.

If you want your files from your current disk, I suggest buying an external drive kit from geeks.com and carefully copying files only after checking for virus.

When you have everything you want, repartition and reformat the old disk.

While this may sound pretty extreme, it will solve most any problem for about $100 and leave you with an external drive for what you would have paid in the first place.

The other possibility is that you have a hardware problem. If that is it and it’s not the hard disk, it will not solve your problem.

I suggest that if the recovery disk works, you will have eliminated all hardware problems except the hard disk.

Another interesting exercise would be to use another computer to download a copy of Knoppix Linux to a CD and boot from that. It is a complete operating system on a CD. It will allow you to access the Internet and to run its word processor. Assuming that works, your hardware with the possible exception of your hard disk is sound.