The PC is rebuilt at last but what a long and involved process!
At first I just re-installed XP. This worked but the anti-virus software that I bought in the weekend was still picking up the virus that originally started me off down this track…….
On saturday morning I also bought an external hard drive. This is VERY cool. I got a Momobay CX2 and put a 40GB HDD in it. This connects to your PC via USB or Firewire and looks just like another hard drive. Anyway – thais allowed me to back up all my data and scan them before formatting my two internal HDD’s
Then I thought I’d be clever – I knew that NT was a pretty fast install and was also the only one that would boot off CD. One install later and I was ready to “upgrade” to XP. Oops, you need SP5 or greater before you can upgrade and I only had SP4 – damn! OK, lets upgrade to Win2K then – yep, that works….now we can put XP on – phew! WinNT, Win2K and WinXP all in the space of about 3 hours.
Now came the apps. Antivirus s/w first :emb: Photoshop, MS office and that’s all for the moment…………
Oh, and I almost screwed it all up by trying out a boot screen manager 
How come you didn’t just do a fresh install of XP? I’ve heard of nothing but nightmares from people who’ve gone the “upgrade” route instead of doing fresh installs. Microsoft just can’t seem to figure out how to make the upgrade process very smooth.
Tom – I couldn’t figure out how to get XP to boot off CD (at least mine…..) In the end though there really was nothing much to upgrade each time as all I did was load the OS to the stage where I could log on. No drivers or s/w to screw up makes a big difference