Xp Media Center setup nightmare

I guess this is a rant and a call for any suggestions.

I am extremely agrivared by this entire media center setup.

First I have xp service pack 2, and wanted to upgrade to media center, idealy a clean upgrade is obviously better but I didn't have xp setup that long and it was still pretty fresh.

So I do the upgrade portion thhat takes place in windows and then it reboots, it gets to the part where its installing devices, and where it says 34 min remaining it just stops and sits there.

I wait and wait, still sitting there so I reboot and try again. Same thing after 3 tries. Its obviously not going to work.

So I boot to cd thinking I will do a clean install, only to find that something is messed with my drives, I figure that i just need to enable large disk support or whatever like normal once I get into xp, but anyways i continue with it and format my c:, and it installs fine and I finally get back into windows / media center.

So now I notice the way all my drivers were setup is totaly messed. Where before I had C: and E: on my 300 gb sata, everything that was on E: is now on G: and I have 2 seperate partitions with windows on it? What the heck???

So anyways i figure I might be able to fix that but i wanna put my shipset drivers on and ethernet so I have a net connection. Install those, and reboot.

Then it boots into the setup again like it did before!!!! I go to the boot selection thinking that I might just have to select a different boot option but there is only 1!

It feels like this thing has totally messed up everything.

Finally got it installed only to find it takes forever to boot and on the second boot it went corrpt.

This piece of crap OS is going in the trash.

Yeah you have to be careful to reinstall disc 1 when you do your install. I did an install the other day and it totally got hosed because disc2 stayed in the tray instead of the disc 1.

shouldn't the disc be on dvd anyhow?

where the hell is the dvd playing software.

only os worse is ME.