Well first off tyvm for your help. At the time there was no reply here yet, so I did some digging around. Found some cool info I never knew in the process, but yes it was the setupp.ini file that I needed. I used the one i got from start > run > %systemroot%\i386\setupp.ini [Pid] ExtraData=786F687170637175716954806365EF Pid=76487OEM you were dead on =) Well when I started playing with the PID, the title bar started changing, now it says "Windows XP Professional Setup". The number I got was not the one from the COA sticker, but if I read correctly from my snooping around, Microsoft has keys on their website to use instead of the COA sticker keys. Thx again for all your help! =D Only problem now is finding out if it will actually be pre-activated, since I don't want to format at this point in time. I hope that when I need to, it won't bail on me.