Looks like vista is keeping a grip on your system and I think you should try to install dos 7.1, I had the same problem so I looked it up on syschat and downloaded it. I recommend you burn a dos-7.1 image to a cd-rw and use BBS to boot form it. Then use fdisk /x to remove partitions and install xp. I would be carefull though, xp pro doesn't support this config well but xp home couldn't work better with it. I do suspect though that if you have a late version os sp2 or better you should be fine.