> Did you try fixing the permission on the registry hives that are broken?
> Give the user read/write access with regedit and see if that fixes the
> matter? (in case you never did any registry permission stuff, just
> right-click whatever needs changing, check permissions...from there on it
> works identical to NTFS permissions).

Yes, I tried doing that. For example, one of my hosed registry item (hive,
is it?) is HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\mailto. As I'm sure you are aware, it
governs the functionality of the mailto: protocol.
When I click on that item/hive, I get a dialogue that says "Cannot open
mailto:
Error while opening key". Right clicking on permissions shows that none of
the checkboxes are checked and noone has rights. I add the administrator
user (who I am logged in as at the time) with full permissions. When I
click
the 'Apply' button, I get an error saying I do not have permission to change
the permissions. *sigh*

> Reinstalling sometimes fixes stuff, but in my opinion it is usually
> "garbage in is garbage out"...

True. But I've tried everything else I can think of short of taking it to
Best
Buy (or somewhere similar) and unfortunately, I don't have the funds.

> For the drive letters, sound like the drive with the OS on it does not
> have a primary partition, else it should be listed before a secondary
> drive.

I actually figured out what was going on with this one. Something I did not
mention in my original post (because I did not think it was relevant) is
that I
have Norton GoBack installed. I'm not exactly sure why, but evidently it
changes the partition type to have a value of 0x44. Running a utility
called
ptedit (which I found during my searches in what might be going wrong), I
was able to see that the type was changed to the above value. When I
changed the partition type to have a value of 0x07 (NTFS bootable), the
windows setup was able to see the drive as the primary (C but then, for
whatever reason, if I bypassed the initial WinXP setup and let the PC boot,
Norton GoBack would encounter an error and force the PC to reboot. If
I changed the partition type back to have a value of 0x44, GoBack was
happy and the PC booted normally.
That was very funky.

thnx,
Christoph