YES! Thanx Denny, I will give that a try, I DO have 2 optical drives!

rbriskar,

In the Boot listing in BIOS does the CD-ROM drive have a check mark in front of its name to indicate that it is enabled as a boot device? If so, do you have more than one optical drive (CD, DVD)? Another user recently spent a couple of days trying to install XP and did not receive the "Press any key..." message because he was using the wrong drive.

rbriskar,

The first thing you must do before reinstalling is set your CD-ROM drive as the first boot device in BIOS. Once that is done you will be able to delete your existing C:\ partition, recreate it, and format it. The procedure here describes the process. This will remove all prior installations of XP. Your RPC problem is associated with the Blaster virus (see this). You can avoid reinfection by this worm after you reinstall XP by enabling the Internet Connection Firewall in XP before you go online. Once you have downloaded and installed all Windows Critical Updates your system will be protected from Blaster without the need for a firewall.

Hi Denny, The reboot problem seems to have cleared up. I have the cd drive selected as the first boot device. However, I do not get the "Press any key to boot from cd" message and when I do see my partitions, it will not allow me to delete the current partition :-(.

Thank you Denny! You are a Godsend!!! That was the problem exactly, tried the other drive and away it went! :-)