>Also sounds like he may have a virus attached to the Main Boot Record. Load FDISK on the floppy, then after you drop the partition, reboot then run FDISK /MBR 6 or 7 times in quick succession, it rewrites the main boot record, some viruses infect the MBR and are hard to kill.

I think you hit the target Neil, about an infection in the MBR. The home-XP guy was just describing too many oddities after a while. And it turns out the *reason* for the XP-reinstall was this: He could connect to web with PC (cable-modem), but it locked up after 5 minutes in each web-session following "furious port I/O activity" (my words, not his). I got suspicious that there was more going on, when I heard this - I suspect someone was hijacking his machine to launch something bad (spam, or perhaps worse).

Then he told me he leaves cable-modem "always on," does not update AV too often, and has 3 teenagers that use the machine a lot (that's when the alarm bells really went off!). An updated AV-scan turned up 2 or 3 worms (or worm remnants) and a whole lot of spyware, including some heavyduty EXE malware. All kinds of nasty junk...and even with XP, apparently the default firewall was still disabled, just to give hackers an extra-wide-open door. This is the kind of non-savvy user-family that sorely needs (or needed long-ago) XPSP2...

BTW, the FDISK-method indeed does the trick for the fix - it's the same technique I used on an XP box several years ago when I was stuck, now that you mention it.

-Thanks (especially from the guy with the crippled machine!)