>It has been a while since this happened so I am out of practice. My main computer has died. (This post is from the Mac). Yesterday I went to check my email and found it unresponsive. I have rebooted it several times and get the same thing every time: Dell logo, Windows XP logo, and then nothing. I could swear I saw an Arabic dialog once, although that is no longer happening. Any resuscitation suggestions?

Mike, if you boot from a WinXP CD there is an option to repair an existing installation (assuming it is a fault in Windows OS rather than some sort of hardware failure). You can also Google for various HDD recovery tools and utlities and disk checking tools eg: http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/