Back up and running
Hooray, things are working again. The first attempt to reinstall XP failed miserably when some of my drivers wouldn't install to the correct partitions (my ATI driver insisted on extracting half its files to C and half to D, awesome huh?) so I had to do it all over again. Back up and running though, and this time around I can actually log into Coolmini properly. For a while I was getting the bloody login errors that have been plaguing some people for months. Anyway I can get back to updates soon.