shinji

Another suggestion is that if you are using labels on the discs it may be de-stabalizing the disc. This will cause the issue you describe. Try making a disc and not applying a label and see if that fixes the issue. I know it did for me as I had a similar issue.

The CD Shell program is mentioned in the Getting Started section. It is also mentioned in the section "Creating a Boot Menu". The website has changed from what is mentioned on the site though. The new site address is http://www.cdshell.org. BTW. It seems to work just fine for me. I am running a test version right now since the site lacked one bit of important information about Windows 2000 and SP4 slipstreamed.

Lol! A kindred spirit...I spent an entire weekend trying to compress a DVD into an AVI. By the way, thanks for this info! I've been looking for some >complete< info like this for a while now. heheh. Copying DVD's to AVI is an art all in its own. I have it down so that I can do a 2 hour movie in about 6 hours now. That include ripping, preperation and encoding time. Does not include burning time.

That seems likely. A friend had problems where it would say unmountable partition for his hard drive and I suggested that it could be a faulty ide cable. I gave him one of my spares and the drive hasn't given him any problems since then.

With Windows messenger and with pretty much any IM program, they use a challenge/response setup. You challenge the other person "Do you wish to accept this file?" and you wait for a response with a "Yes." or "No.". The problem lies in getting the response part. The firewall is probably blocking the response and not letting it through. The other person probably gets the challenge though.

Yea. It can be done. You need a boot sector file. Preferably one from either a Windows 2000 or Windows XP CD. Then you need a program that can create a bootable image file for you to burn. As for putting on updates, the farthest you can really go is slipstreaming SP1 into the installation. You can download and put all the post-SP1 hotfixes in a seperate folder on the cd as well as your apps but you will still have to execute them manually.