One of our family laptops got the BSOD due to the recent XP Update (KB977165). None of our laptops were provided with XP disks - Dell's policy was to load XP in a partition on the hard drive and not give you a disc. All the published solutions refer to using the XP recovery utility - which is fine if you have an XP disc, but for those who don't, the advice is useless. I contacted DELL and Microsoft for help and they were also useless. Both wanted to charge me to fix a problem for which they are culpable (MS for the dodgy download, DELL for not providing XP boot discs). Anyway, after some searching I found a solution and the laptop now works. The solution lies in downloading the Recovery utility. This is how i did it: