Hi I now found out what thw problem was / is. First, as you may know or not, in Europe it's perfectly legal to buy OEM licenses and install the xp on a different system, than that which the OEM license is from...it may not be so in the USA. It is legal as long as it is only installed once and you got the COA key sticker and CD and booklet. So, now I got a legal xp home that was activated correctly many times on my PC, never any prob with that when calling Microsoft´s Activation Hotline. The first time, after buying the license and cd I had to answer the usual two questions: 1. is this an OEM license - yes, 2. on how many systems is it installed - 1. Since then I've installed xp on my system many times and have been able to activate correctly after - recently I formatted 10 GB less on my hard drive when installing and created a second partition with the rest of the system and use the FREEWARE TOOL http://www.drivesnapshot.de/en/down.htm : Now this is the BEST software for creating backups I've ever encountered: 1. it is only one single, small file 2. You can make a backup of you Windows or Linux system while WORKING: we even made backups of file servers while they were up and running in the network - never any problem recovering those! 3. The program lets you backup your system for a number of days (I think 30) but from then on you may always RESTORE the system! Just use the rescue disk described on the homepage or build a Bart's PE or rescue CD. (With BARTS PE snapshot only lets you recover files ON A HARDDISK) I think it is even better than TrueImage and other programs, because it is free and so easy to use!! Try it I still think it obnoxious to have to activate my xp each time after installing it, but there seems to be no way to skip the SLP bios check in a legal way, and I want t have a legally activated CD -- I mean, that's what I bought it for. I used Windows 2000 for a number of years and never had to activate, so I think the xp activation sucks!! Because my PC doesn't have a SLP-recognized bios the pre-activation won't ever work on my PC - or so it seems. Do you know any way to pass the BIOS lock for regular PCs?