It's my understanding (understanding that this is all information gleaned from countless hours spent googling solutions to my problems) that since my system has been updated to include SP3 that trying to do a repair install without slipstreaming SP3 into my original installation cd is dooming the repair installation to failure. I wanted to try to do a repair install first since there have been quite a few software packages added to my system and I really don't want to have to reinstall all of them in addition to XP. Maybe I don't understand what Presets are. I'd assumed that they were presets from my existing system that could be included in the new slipstreamed CD. If I'm understanding your response correctly, the presets are from previous runs in nLite and speed up the build process, so there won't be any presets the first time I run nLite, correct?