[slodave]

Addendum:

I had a computer (Dell w/XP Home) that was hosed and needed to reinstall the OS last night. The client did not have the Dell OS disk handy, although I knew where it was. I had a copy that I had recently burned, but never marked the CD as being a Dell branded XP. Since I had to wait until the A.M. to pick up the clients copy of XP, I decided to use mine and see if the key would work. I decided to SS SP3 into the home version. No problems. On the install, I was never asked to enter the validation key. A little later, I noticed that I had successfully SS SP3 into a Dell branded XP disk. From what I had read, this was not possible. Live and learn.

If you could make a similar CD from the HP partition - you may be able to SS SP3 to it and make the reinstall a little easier.

Also, you can't just setup XP on one computer and ghost it to 3 others and expect things to fly. If you go this route, you need to run a small app that allows you to change the SSID number of each of the three ghosted workstation.

What I suggested you do, is install the OS and all necessary apps on one computer and then before ghosting, you run a command (there's a little more to it than just running) called sysprep and it will take care of the SSID and a few other things. Then you ghost to the other three workstations and when you first boot to Windows, it will ask a few basic setup questions, but at least by the time you are in Windows, all apps will have been installed and will run. You just nee to customize for each workstation.

Dave