Sorry, this is a long post but hopefully a thorough explanation of my problems...
I seem to have spent the entire day today trying to do something that I thought would be fairly quick!
Yesterday I repartitioned my iMac to a single partition with Leopard installed (it did have Tiger + a small dev Leopard partition), then I did the bootcamp setup and now have a 30GB partition with XP Pro SP 2 VLP on it. I fully updated windows while booted natively then I rebooted to OSX and started running into problems. I went with my VLP copy of XP (from MSDN) incidentally rather than Vista because I'm damned if I can really work out the whole activation thing in relation to my MSDN account with Vista and I've already activated it a bunch of times, can't risk running out because of my work and hell, for what I want, Vista's merely eye candy anyway!
Firstly I fired up bootcamp from within Fusion and it told me that the disk geometry had changed or something like that so I should remove and re-add the disk. Doh! I forgot I'd been playing about with Bootcamp in Fusion months ago!! Not knowing exactly how to do this I deleted the bootcamp VM folder from within the application support directory. Fusion then rebuilt it's bootcamp support and off it went... to an immediate BSOD.
After a couple of trys it was apparent that it wasn't a one off instance so i decided to boot back natively with bootcamp. Unfortunately that blue screen'd as well. SO, I then started searching for answers but everything I could find was old info describing booting into bootcamp natively and fixing up the registry. I couldn't do that since my Mac keyboard doesn't work until the windows drivers load so i can't change to safe mode or anything. Plus, after trying that in the VM it was obvious that whatever option I chose it was going to blue screen on my anyway. Finally, I chose to use the last known good configuration and it booted - wahey! Virtual this time.
So, now back up and running I booted a couple of times both native and VM and everything seemed okay. Natively, I installed the tools, then I installed Steam, played a couple of games and all was good.
Unfortunately, running as a VM still seems to be incredibly flakey. Twice now this afternoon something has just hung and the CPU has gone to 100% on one of it's core's. XP has basically become so bogged down that I've not been able to do anything with it. I'm not sure what caused it the first time and I had to just "shut down" the virtual machine.
The second time this happend I know what caused it. I clicked the little speaker icon in the system tray as I wanted to turn the volume up!! That's it! This time I sat with it and about an hour later XP finally shut itself down. It never managed to come back up as a virtual machine though. I'm going to reboot to XP natively in a mo to see if it's all hosed or not - i hope not, I've not got the bandwidth to be downloading games again 
My question is this: Is there anything I can try or anything I can supply to try and resolve this? I've already uninstalled fusion, rebooted and reinstalled once this afternoon. Please bear in mind that when it happens XP is more or less entirely unresponsive so I can't get into task manager to see what's pushed the CPU through the roof!
Any help appreciated.
Thanks,
Martin.
