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I think I understand what you're explaining.
But as a user, I'm sick of fighting viruses and hackers with Microsoft.
I want to try the other side. MS lost me two years ago when the first issue of SP3 came out and crashed my Toshiba A75 S226 laptop.
It took about another year before SP3 would work for me.
And in that time, I've picked up a MBR Rootkit that I can't shake.
I tried SpywareHammer.com and they helped, but the MBR Rootkit kept coming back, and they got tired of helping me and banned me.
Others have tried to help, and I've picked up a few books, but my DOS isn't that good, so I still have this rootkit that loads before Windows loads.
Either I'll figure this out before I die, and the XP system is ancient history, or I'll get mad and burn this damned computer and melt it down in a fire.

Do you know which particular rootkit you have? I did a little googling around and there is a rootkit detector/remover that might help called gmer.

There is a new MBR rootkit floating around that has received attention from MS as well as from several of the security folks such as Marco Giuliani at Webroot, who has an entry on the rootkit here. One of the comments on that entry states that the gmer tool appears to be effective against this new rootkit. You might give that a try.

Also, rootkits that get to XP will not necessarily get to Win7 or even Vista. Again, as per Marco Giuliani's entry, the new rootkit does not appear to be compatible with Vista or Win7, but most likely only XP or Win 2003, so if you were to run Win7 or Vista, you should not have the same difficulties with rootkits that you're having now with XP.