No...not a contradiction. The first repair I tried was from the recovery console, which gives me a command prompt. By recovery/reinstall, I actuall meant I tried to do a repair from the second set of menus on the XP disk. After typing F8 to install, XP setup looked for existing installations anp gave me an option of repairing the existing installation. I believe this method reinstalls the windows files withou formatting the rest of the hard drive.. ....Do I make any sense at all? sorry if I don'tm but I am trying.