Lobster wrote:

Before I go on to sort this out (will have a look at John's
slipstreaming!) - do people actually reckon it's worthwhile installing the
OS on a separate partition as I did last time (I'd make it 30 Gb, rather
than 20 Gb this time!) or is it a waste of time and effort?

Yes, and while you're at it, arrange for your Documents folder to be on
the data drive, not where XP puts it by default, which is in a
sub-sub-sub-folder of your Windows directory. I'd also make the C: drive
about 40Gig on a 250Ggig drive, to leave room for all the cr@p and a
decent size swap file. Then again, I've got a couple of programs that
have gigabytes of data files they need to have in their home directory.

"My Documents" is off the root of D: on this machine, and when I have to
re-install Windows, all my data is sitting there untouched.

--
Tciao for Now!

John.