I had the same problem today, and after finding nothing from searching the web, i found a soulution to the problem myself. The link from microsoft didn't work for me. I had a situatuon where the mother***rd was fried by a lightning stirike, so it had to be replaced. Offcourse, i had to repair my windows installation, but i didn't know which version of XP pro was installed, and neither did the owner. I tried repairing with a cd that had SP2 integrated, and ran into this problem. So, booted from SP* cd, and restarted the repair process, and the problem was gone. So, it was just a different service pack that caused the problem in my case. Hope this helps