I have a Win2K installation disk, and can get into the repair console. Any ideas on where to proceed from there? And what does the "repair this installation" option do? Would that retain the current program installations and settings, or does it just completely blow away the registry?

It's not clear from the information I've been able to find. I think it overwrites a lot of stuff, but I'm not sure.

[link|http://www.wown.com/articles_tutorials/wxprcons.html|This] page talks in some detail about what can be done with the recovery console. Scroll down to "listsvc" for information about services and drivers you can turn on or off. Lots of luck figuring out which ones to disable though. :-(

Knoppix has some Win recovery stuff. "Knoppix Hacks" describes some of the things that can be done in Chapter 7. You can read it online at O'Reilly. It's not clear whether you can get it free. Try [link|http://safari.oreilly.com/?x=1&mode=toc&sortKey=title&sortOrder=asc&view=W&xmlid=0596007876&g=&catid=&s=1&b=1&f=1&t=1&c=1&u=1&r=&o=1&n=1&d=1&p=1&a=0&srchText=|here]. It doesn't look like it would be trivial to make repairs, but you might be able to use it to save things that might be overwritten.

My guess is the simplest thing (if the wown link isn't helpful) is to backup your Windows installation, try a repair using the Windows CD and see if that fixes things. If you lose too much customization, you'll be able (in principle) to restore the overwritten files.

Best of luck!

Cheers,
Scott.