Hello, cliff... most of us will suffer senior moments if we are lucky enough. Could I have a look at your boot.ini file, please? It is C:\boot.ini [you must set to show protected op sys files].
Else this will retrieve it for you - go Start, and paste into the Run box:
control sysdm.cpl,,3
...press the Startup n Rec Settings button, then the Edit button.

According to the problem that you have mentioned, it means that there is a problem with the booting file of the system.

Either you can access the boot file by
typing "c:\boot.ini" in run field or you can right click on My Computer and than click on properties.
In properties , click on Settings
under "Startup and Recovery" and then click on Edit.

You will than see a notepad which has info about boot file.

Just highlight that information ,copy it and than paste it here in this thead.

It's not a problem with Boot.ini

When restoring from a start-up it gets a BSOD, which means it's past the boot.ini phase and when booting the system from scratch you have to manually select the boot order. This is a bios matter and not related to the boot.ini file.

As far as the restore issue I'd suggest installing SP3 and hoping for the best, if that doesn't work then do a repair install of windows (factoring in that it may be an issue with a program that is trying to restore with your system, so you should look into that first)

For the manual selection of the hard drive I'd guess that you never changed your boot order back after you booted from your CD drive for the install. Open your bios settings (usually DEL or F4 at start-up) and change the boot order and hard drive priority.

Cliff,

First please

When you boot your Computer, do you see a welcome screen of WinXP?

Does your Computer passes that welcome screen?

Regards,

it sounds to me, I could have misinterpreted this, that he's able to boot fin if he manually selects the drive but he BSODs if he tries to come back up after putting his system to sleep.

I have to concur with OlyComputers - first we need to address the BIOS boot-order priority settings; then we can resolve the problems on operating system startup.

From a powered down situation, start the computer, and enter the BIOS settings (one of DEL, F1, F2, sometimes F4 or F10) - the ensure that your main HDD (the one with the OS loaded) is the first in boot priority.

"After a recent Senior Moment, I re-installed XP and have since encountered countless problems. The latest being that I have to press F11 on start-up and arrow down to HDD."
Why does he have to use the F11 one-shot boot device selection? BIOS should not go there by itself unless there is an interrupt? There is a boot problem.. somewhere...
Separately, and yes, a BSOD occurs when there is a driver loading issue, way after boot.ini is finished with. So a driver or service is bad, even one from LKG.

[boot loader]
timeout=1
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect

Bios wouldn't go to the boot menu ever, if the boot settings are incorrect it would just generate an error of "invalid boot device" or "ntoskrnl not found". The F11 (on systems that have it) is something that you need to do manually during boot, like DEL to enter setup. If using this menu allows him to boot it means that the boot device is valid but the settings in BIOS are incorrect.