After my misadventures with Windows over the past two week, my home workstation is back to operational status.

When I got into the particularly sticky spot where E: was the new boot drive but lots of things still pointed to C:, the old boot drive, these articles helped resolve the problem:

• Knowledge Base Article 223188 lays out the 19-step (yikes!) process of editing the DosDevice registry entries
• Annoyances.org Changing Primary / Boot Drive Drive Letter  (sic) with lots of clues
• Bart's Preinstalled Environment tool to build a bootable Windows XP CD - a lifesaver when you can't boot Windows from the hard disk
• xvi32 Hex editor

So, the single action that fixed the problem was to boot my BartPE CD, mount a network drive from the server where I had previously copied xvi32, ran xvi32 and opened the E:\WINNT\System32\Config\system file (the registry file containing the DosDevice entries), carefully searched for the DosDevice\E entry and change the 'E' to 'C', and saved the change.  (I had made a backup copy of the file "system" before I saved this change!)

Then, I was able to successfully run a recovery install of Windows XP SP 2 and get my life back.

I'm still thinking life would be so much easier if I would switch my main home workstation to Mac OS X...