Greetings, A friend asked me to look at a PC with some problems, some of which were residual from an expensive "Geeks on Call" visit. It came with WinME and a version of Norton A/V compatible with ME was installed and subsequently upgraded. The upgrade caused part of the problem. After resolving the A/V issue my first goal was to upgrade to XP Home as ME was also causing exceptions on bootup. The upgrade wouldn't run with a MSFT msg stating why. Ok, so ME isn't directly upgradable to XPH (other posts say otherwise but I wonder). I ran a W2K upgrade instead which worked (other posts say this isn't an upgrade, I wonder yet again). I still want XPH on this PC and do not wish to do a FRESH install. The question....can his be done? Can the registry be juiced to get this done?

Well, an upgrade to XP Home from ME is in fact possible. I have done it on countless machines, including one I owned, but on just about every one of them there were problems after. Did you run the compatibility check on the first screen? You probably have something causing a conflict, not the least of which could be the BIOS. Good luck.

Yes, ran the compatibility check first which is probably where the MSFT msg came from. Didn't think the BIOS would be a problem at the OS level but always a possibilty I guess. I want to return the PC to my friend this week with XP Home. It currently has an "upgraded" W2K install and I have the original ME restore disks and can begin again from scratch if necessary. Can I get from W2K to XP Home?

Well, someone else may know for sure, but I think I read that XP Home is not in the upgrade path from W2K. XP Pro is. You can find that info on the MS site where I think I read that. If I were you I would take a look at the Gateway site and see what they say about an upgrade.

ken is right

Alleviate all the upgrade problems and do a clean install, very simple http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/cleanxpinstall.html

If doing a clean install was an option, which it isn't, I wouldn't have wasted my or anbody else's time with this post. I should've been able to upgrade from ME directly tp XPH but the existing configuration wouldn't accept it so I was forced into a new direction. There has to be a registry tweak that will enable me to override the W2K install. I'll probably settle on dual boot.