Has anyone ever experienced (XP NO PUT INTENDED LOL) an installation of XP that was just totally messed up? I mean to the extent that any knoweledgable technician would scratch his head? I recently came accross such a thing. We all know that Windows XP has extensive driver support. Well this installation didn't install any of them. While in the device manager, every device indicated that it needed a driver. (I came accross this as I fix PC's for people) Right clicking and selecting update driver worked for just about everything. But then the problem gets worse. After I got all the drivers installed, I went to install her ISP software and it said that blah wasn't installed. Turns out blah is a service which is installed with XP and there is no possible way that it couldn't be installed. So I go into the Services list, and right click on the service and select start. Windows tells me that it can't start and it doesn't know why but the log could probably tell me more. This was for the Remote Access Service or something close to that. So then I say to myself well what else is there, and I find another service called Remove Access Service Manager, I right click on that select start and boom go to hell access is denied. Ummm now what. Now I go to the Microsoft website and they tell me to download and install Service Pack 1. Cool I think, that will fix all the problems with this damn install. I burn it to a cd, drive all the way accross town to this ladies house again, put the cd in, and BOOM again, the Cryptography service failed to start. Windows cannot authenticate this update. This application will now close. OMG Give me a 12 Gauge. So what do I do... I delete the partition, reinstall windows xp, and it works like a charm. Interesting.....

Delete the partition, then reinstall. Who install her XP OS anyway? Friend? OEM? That's a strange one.