I downloaded the non VL version of Windows XP SP3 and I was able to successfully activate windows. So it all works.

-Deozaan (May 16, 2008, 10:18 PM)

I also downloaded the non-VL version from here, but now I can't activate it.
How did you do it? Did it accept your product key during the installation? Mine didn't, I tried again right after installing and it still doesn't, not even by phone.

I formatted my PC this morning, using an nLited Windows XP SP3 disc (made using an original SP2 CD and a slipstreamed SP3 exe file, no other customisation was made).

After spending the best part of the day slowly (yay for multiple reboots!) reinstalling and reconfiguring everything, I hit the first problem: the right-click context menu would freeze explorer indefinitely, forcing a ctrl-alt-del to kill the process.
The event logs reported nothing, even though it happened every single time I right-clicked a folder/file.

I decided to do a system restore to the most recent automatic restore point and see if that problem would go away, and it did. I began reinstalling everything again but I noticed something was wrong: now the folders wouldn't remember the window positioning and view settings (even though I have it checked in folder options of explorer). Every time I restarted the computer, the quick launch bar would rearrange itself. Then somehow it got even worse, and now it starts disabled by default...

Meanwhile, I discovered what was causing the original context menu problem, I (rather stupidly) had told Eraser to enable background entropy polling.

Now I don't know what to do: I thought about reverting to my original restore point (with the context menu problems, easy to "fix" by configuring Eraser correctly), but since it appears that my first restore operation caused all this mess with explorer's settings, I'm afraid of making things even worse.

Does anyone know how to fix this, or would I be better off reformatting everything?
I'd really like to avoid that given that I've wasted so many hours already, but if that's the best solution so be it. If so, should I reuse my nLited disc, or install plain vanilla SP2 and use Windows Update to install SP3?

I haven't yet tested this, but I think that if you backup your photos to a CD or RAR archive in the Winter and erase them from your hard disk, then copy them again to the disk in the Summer, Windows will set the modified time equal to what it was in the Winter (which is the modified time when the files were backed up).
If you leave those files in the disk until the next hour change, Windows will then reduce the modified time by one hour.

Once again, I have no idea if this is the correct explanation for this problem, all I know is that I have a lot of pics with disagreeing dates even though I never modified them.