Thing never lets me alone. Made a couple of home movies using Studio7 and they play OK on WMP from the hard drive. Tried putting them on disk (CD-R) and the disks play OK on another computer but when I try to play them on the XP machine (Pavillion, 1.8, plenty of RAM and stuff) the machine goes ape. The screen freezes, so does the keyboard, and the mouse pointer gets captured by the task bar, changes colour to black and looks like a ball with a triangle on top. All it will do as the trackball is moved is go sideways a little, opening all the windows it can, but nothing actually works. Three finger salute gives a shutdown screen but does not operate (sometimes it does, when the keyboard wants to respond) but I cannot shut down the program or the computer. Ejecting the cd does no good, and I have to manually shut down, remove the cd to make the pour dear feel better again.
I asked HP and their advice (after several attempted fixes) is to re-load the OS, losing all my programs and data in the process. Yuck.
Question: Is it possible to reload XP without affecting my programs and settings and data? The machine did not come with a recovery CD, it uses a partition on the HDD to store the program utilities.
Question: Can I use the recovery program that comes with XP to take the machine back to an earlier date and see if the problem re-occurs? This would let me find the offending software (if that is what the problem is) and remove it.
Question: After taking the machine back and resolving (or not) the problem, can I bring it all back to today's config without losing everything? (recover from recover).
Not game to just suck it and see, the machine belongs to the wife and she is seriously unimpressed with my computer skills already.

You could try reinstalling XP over itself which may solve the problem. It usually lives in c:/windows/options/cabs/setup.exe

Using the restore program will not affect your data files but you will need to reinstall any programs that you put on the machine after the date that you are going back to.

Try posting here it may be better.Pinnacle Support (http://www.pinnaclesys.com/docsupport1.asp?division_id=1&langue_id=2&product_id=469&product_name=Studio%20version%207&page_id=86) and go to the English Forum, it may be better!

thanx for the help, but if I use restore to go back to an earlier point, and it does not help me with the problem, can I re-restore back to today and not lose any of my programs?

Yes there is an undo restore function as well.

Have a look in the help files under system restore and it will explain things a bit more clearly than I do.