Through a time intensive couple of weeks, I finally isolated what was causing my machine to not initalize past the the swishing Windows XP sp3 screen. Using Acronis, I discovered (going through each and every setting) that the selection of "Old Prefetch Data" was the culprit. For some reason, all the other options work great for cleaning, but when I apply this one, my machine does not boot past the windows screen (blue boxes swishing across the screen). Just wanted to let you know as I love this program and have recommended it for a couple of years now, and wanted to warn about possible hosing of machines.
Now on other machines this option works fine, but my XP sp3 for some reason it does not... running an ispiron 1520, 3.5mb ram, 500gb hd, etc...
thanks for the great program.