[Fyron]

What kind of "recovery" CD was this? If it was provided by an OEM, it is possible that it has a config file that is set to say yes to some or all of the installation prompts, such as "format the drive and install, even if an install already exists." You'd have to have a pretty stupid OEM to do that, but you never know...

Renegade: You should probably throw the "recovery" CD in the face of the head of the company that made your comp, then demand a real XP CD sans the garbage config file.

OSes shouldn't be managing boot files willy-nilly during the normal shutdown process... The boot files don't need to change unless you change your hardware or kernel files, which certainly doesn't happen every time you are running the OS. That's just asking for trouble, and definitely a Windows flaw if true.

Note that he never said he was turning it off while shutting down, but rather while booting up. Killing the bootup early on isn't an issue, since all its doing is reading data and building up RAM files. Perhaps not good due to mild stress on the drive, but definitely not going to kill Windows at this point.

Don't forget that NTFS is a journalling file system. It doesn't let files be written to the real location until they are completely on the drive...