Well, after a month of thinking "ah, bugger it, Linux works fine for me, besides, it's only popups on XP. nothing serious", and increasing amounts of startup popups (up to three memory read things now) I suddenly remembered that you could do a repair install, saving hours of putting data back and thinking "ah, bugger it, I wish I had backed that up". So far, so good. It's got 37 minutes* left till usage. Finding the driver disks has covered me in copious amounts of dust. I'll report back when it's done.
EDIT: Key entered, keyboards set. Formats changed from mm/dd/yy to the Real DealTM
EDIT2: It now boots, explorer loads, but I still get 2 error messages. Luckily, they look a bit more informative.
*read: hah, it's actually 123 but it's funny watching you shout!