[KingFish]

Do not go into the "repair" or "recovery console" from booting off the XP CD -

Follow instructions as though you were going to do a fresh install - then AFTER you've hit F8 agreeing with their licence, you select the partition to install XP on, (where your current installation already is) it will detect a previous version of XP, and give you the option to just repair that installation, Choose that option.

You won't loose any of your files, or personal settings, it's way easier to repair windows this way then by hitting "R" after first booting off the XP CD.