I was recently forced to do a repair install of Windows XP after it had issues when I tried to install a firewire card. Removed it, and it just wouldn't boot. Enabled bootlogging and it got to mup.sys.

However, I only have an SP0 (i.e. original Windows XP) disk lying around, and so I had to use that to repair the install with. However, it had been ugpraded to SP2 prior to the repair. IE7 wouldn't start, so I tried installing 6 directly. That didn't help. Removed an error message on boot, but that was it.

So I downloaded SP2 with Firefox (Yay for Firefox!), and installed it without touching anything. Bad, bad idea. After four hours on the computer, trying to discover what went wrong, I was back to Windows not booting. Just hit mup.sys (and maybe some other stuff), then flashed a blue-screen (way too fast to see), then rebooted.

Did a repair install *again*, and I'm going to be a bit more careful this time: How to I fix the install so that it will install SP2? Ideally, how do I fix it so that I can use IE to hit WindowsUpdate? I'd rather do that, if possible.

I did have a com error come up during install:

sub-component com+ raised an exception while processing the oc_complete_installation d:\nt\com\comlx\src\complussetup\comsetup\csetuput il.cpp (line 3406) 0x8007007f
Specified procedure could not be found
failed to load library 'c:\windows\system32\catsrv.dll'
So I'll try some of the fixes suggested for that, and see how I get on. Hopefully I can get everything working again. Hopefully Photoshop and whatnot will still work. It's my sister's computer. I use GIMP . (I've already had bad experiences with HD death and insufficient backups. Free software at least says "Oh well, at least that wasn't $1,000 down the drain").