>Its a weekend problem.
>
>Old laptop running windows xp
>
>Keyboard is very unhappy. Several keys not working at all including several that are in the password.
>
>Administrator is password protected.
>
>How do I start this up so I can copy some files off the hard drive ?
>
>Any ideas ?

As Sergey suggests - simply plugging in another keyboard would be the simplest solution.

But if you are going to copy files off it then I assume that it has been networked in the past. If that's the case you should be able to just let it boot up and then access the drives via an ethernet connection......