advanced happy (lunar) new year, everyone!

sorry about this if it sounds like i'm just rephrasing my earlier thread on recovering files/folders from the desktop of a corrupted winxp pro install. i've tried the suggestions you gave me, but nothing worked. i cannot boot to my colleague's account using his hard drive because i'll only be looped back to the boot menu - any choice i make gets me back to the boot menu. i'll just ask for your opinions on some suggestions we came across during the last few weeks.

when my colleague and i asked people from our it department, they said it boiled down to xp's security policy - unless you booted into your account, you cannot access the desktop. i've been tempted to reinstall winxp but that would just destroy all the data we're trying to recover. the data happens to be six months' worth of photo files of our boss. some have suggested nortonworks, but can nortonworks unlock the data from the desktop folder if you're not logged into the account where the affected desktop belongs?

another said i should connect the affected drive as a slave to a pc running linux. problem is, there's no one running linux in our building. not even the it department. would you know of someone who managed to recover desktop data in this way?