I am running an Tyan KT board with an athalon 800. During the install of xp i deleted and recreated a new c:\ partition. It formated my disk using the NTFS file system and loaded the startup files. After the reboot it started going into it's actual setup. I received an error that said "SXS.dll error in manifest or policy" I currently have WinME on my system. I tried doing the XP upgrade, New Install, and also tried using FAT32, FAT16, NTFS during the installations. Anyone have any thoughts?

use an original purchased legit xp cd magically no manifest parse error ,imagine that

Just to make one small precision: the sxs.dll error could occur if you make a copy of the original Windows XP (Pro or Home) CD. But please, do not imagine that every body that has this error has made an illegal copy of the new Microsoft operating system. I have recieved Windows XP as part of my MSDN Universal account (Disc 1012, dated October 2001, color label green). If I install the product (either XP Home or XP Pro) on a machine of my lab at work, it works. If I install it on my machine at home, it does not work. The major differences are CPU type (Pentium 4 at work, Pentium 3 at home), the bus speed (Ultra ATA 100 at work, Ultra ATA 66 at home), the number of discs (only one at work, two at home) and the number of CD-ROM drives (only one at work, two at home). It is also good to note that I had the problem at work as well, but I solved it. The only problem is that I do not remember how I did that and I can not reproduce the problem again... So far, I am thinking of three possible reasons to explain this famous SXS.DLL issue: 1) The CD-ROM speed is too fast for the bus type. For instance, let's say you have a 48x CD-ROM drive and an Ultra ATA 66 MHz bus, then the CD-ROM is going too fast. This is one explanation I found on several web sites, but I did not tried to reduce the speed of the CD-ROM drive so far (I do not know if it is possible and how to do it). 2) There are too many partitions on the disk, or too many partitions on several disks, or the partition table is corrupted. That's also an information I found on the Internet. When I solved the problem at work, I had only one disk with only one partition (or even no partition at all). I tried to reproduce the problem at work with an hard disk containing more than one partition, but the installation worked. So there should be something more to know. However, this the area I will investigate, because I am suspecting some strange behaviour here. 3) The way the SXS.DLL file is working is different on Pentium 4 than it is on older processors; or at least the hardware has an impact on the way DLL signing works. No, I am not joking. To solve the "dll hell" problem, Microsoft has introduced so called "side-by-side assemblies" in Windows XP (for more details, read article at http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/msi/assm_6lv7.asp). Windows XP is also relying more on components signing (this already existed with previous version of Windows for drivers). This signing system, as well as the assemblies used now with XP, are a bit complex. To understand all of it, read Microsoft knowledge base article Q316696 (http://support.microsoft.com/search/preview.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q316696). At the end of this article, there is a link to a document titled "How to build and service isolated applications and side-by-side assemblies for Windows XP". By the way, the article Q316696 refers to a problem with assembly manifests. And guess what ? The problem is due to a file called.... SXS.DLL !! Microsoft has officially recognized this to be an issue, that a fix exists in the form of a new file (dated 09-Mar-2002), and that this file will be delivered as part of Windows XP Service Pack 1. We only could blame Microsoft to not put that fix directly on their web site (they say it must be tested a while). However, if you want the fix immediately, you can call Microsoft Support as it is mentionned in the article. Good Luck to all of you. Didier Schmassmann Deloitte & Touche Switzerland (for e-mail, remove the ".noadds" from the above address, this is to avoid unwanted advertising mails) PS: for those who might have bad opinion of me because I am using my private MSDN account to install XP on a machine at work, just think that the MSDN license allows to install and activate Windows XP on up to 10 different machines.