Well I followed the advice about getting HP recovery discs from HP. Turns out they are not available for my box. How do you spell planned obsolesance?

Tried to implement recovery from my built in recovery. No go, it just sits there and blinks at me. Reason for my OS problem is that I had problems with the of/on switch which entailed cold booting a lot, which I think is the source of my OS problems. Lesson learned - Don't but the cheapest computer you can find. True that software doesn't wear out, but hardware sure does..

Anyway, I'm off to find someone to let me use their XP disc.

See ya.