Reloaded
On my home workstation "Earthshine" I'd been hearing some clicking coming from the 4-year-old 30GB hard drive that the OS was installed on. The XP installation was probably about 2 years old, and performance was becoming slow. Also, I found the main cause of a major frame-drop issue I had trying to capture our Hi8 tape archives to the computer for DVD archiving; the NVidia-supplied drivers for the GeForce2 card. Even when going back to the MS-supplied ones, things weren't superb. So I decided to re-use the 60GB drive that had just come out of the machine when I put a 160GB drive in as the new OS drive.
I had just finished up making and testing an integrated-SP2 Windows XP Pro CD at work, so I used that to build the new instance, with a 30GB C: volume on the 60GB disk. Leaving off the NVidia drivers, my video capture problem was solved. I was able to migrate our Firefox bookmarks/preferences and Thunderbird email folders to the new OS instance relatively easily since they appear to just looks for well-formed files and directories in the proper places. Other core office and multimedia apps were installed, and the system is running quite nicely now.
I know, it would have been more liberating to scrap Windows and run Linux; but that's what I think the remaining space on the 60GB drive is for. ;)