[Fyron]

"Installing unsigned drivers and software is the second."

"Signed" versus "unsigned" drivers means virtually nothing. Plenty of "signed" drivers are quite shoddy. They just ponied up the money for the signing... What is important is finding out if the company puts real effort into driver making, or if they just churn out crap that works most of the time.

"The reason that XP does this is so that it will restart after you make changes or add hardware. All Plug and Play OS’s need to overwrite the boot files at shut down... What he was doing is called bouncing the loader. If you happen to catch it at the wrong moment, you’ll end up with damaged files."

So not letting it boot up interferes with rewriting of boot files at shutdown time. Interesting proposition.

"I only fault you for blaming the OS for not being ID- ten-T proof."

I fault the OS for being set up to change boot files during booting, as you seem to be claiming it does. It makes no sense to change them at this time, especially if you didn't add any hardware, thus not creating a need for plug'n'play operations to kick in...

"The vast majority of XP systems never get reinstalled... The system I'm on now is using a three year old install, and still works fine."

The vast majority of XP systems are run by people that do not know how to take care of their PCs either way. I haven't witnessed XP to be any better at maintaining itself than 2k, both of which are only marginally better than 98...

There are certainly external tools you can get to keep Windows from eating itself, but they tend to cost money. Decent OS setup will let you get back up and running in under 20 minutes after the reinstall (or however long it takes you to restore your drive image if you go that route). I find it to be less effort overall, and much more effective, especially when maintaining the computers of people that like to install a lot of crap.