An inability to complete a clean installation is often down to corrupt data on the CD, or a problem with memory.

Try copying the contents of the CD to hard disk - any errors reported? Then try making a CD copy of the installation CD. Do a memory test - there's plenty of freeware memory test programs out there.

SD

Well I'm not entirely sure what I did right but it's worked.
After 2 years of trying off and on, I have got Win XP.

I loaded it over the top of my Win ME, even though every trouble shooting guide I have read says not to. It failed initially with a setupdd.sys address date/stamp error message. I rebooted and carried on with the load sequence. 45 mins later it's in and running. Marvelous. Cheers.:ok: