aloima

not to avoid your question but, why don't you just install something like K-lite Codec pack with media player classic (new version) which plays subtitles no problem and make your life easier? dvdplay is sooo old and extremely limited!

not really sure what you're trying to do exactly, but if the boot sector is hosed then when you boot up with the winxp/2k cd you could enter the command console and run both fixboot and fixmbr. that usually fixes the disk so it'll boot up. you should be able to ghost after that. other possibility is that the NTFS system has a 'dirty' flag on it and needs to be removed before you can proceed. hope that helps you out! not really sure what you're trying to do exactly, but if the boot sector is hosed then when you boot up with the winxp/2k cd you could enter the command console and run both fixboot and fixmbr. that usually fixes the disk so it'll boot up. you should be able to ghost after that. other possibility is that the NTFS system has a 'dirty' flag on it and needs to be removed before you can proceed. hope that helps you out!

first i would make sure that the service is running, or at least set to manual and not disabled. then go to this page and follow the instructions. it's a good site with lots of useful tweaks. http://www.dougknox.com/xp/utils/fix_windows_xp_help.htm

Why worry about what XP is looking for, if you are using a DVD then you could fit every MS operating system on there and still have room left over. I would dump both OS on the disk and go from there. By the way, i'm not sure if you were saying that you can't do a winme install unattended or not, but actually you can. same with XP. just don't know about doing one right after the other, but probably if you used the [GUI RUNONCE] section of the unattended file to launch the other installation it just might work.

It's unlikely to be a hardware problem since it was working just fine yesterday. Do you have the winxp cd? worst case scenario you could boot up with the cd and do a repair install. that only takes a couple of hours tops. Or if you want to keep poking around then you could boot into safe mode and try several things, like a virus scan, a spyware scan, and run the system file checker from a command line sfc /scannow it will probably take just as long to do either method, so it's up to you how much time you want to spend playing around with your computer. me personally i like to try to figure out what's wrong with it, but sometimes the faster method is just repair the installation and move on.

here's another idea you might want to try; re-registering the Dll files for OE. regsvr32 urlmon.dll regsvr32 shdocvw.dll regsvr32 actxprxy.dll regsvr32 oleaut32.dll regsvr32 mshtml.dll regsvr32 browseui.dll regsvr32 shell32.dll run those from the command line or a batch file. it might get OE working properly again.