I have just purchased a new motherboard and have been researching how to install it on the internet. Upon completing the installation of the board several people on various forums have had problems with the OS recognising the new settings. Several sites advocate doing a clean install of the OS and others who state doing a repair. Presumably if I do a clean install I would loose all the data currently on the hard drive, would this be the case if I just repaired the current OS? What are the advantages of a clean install over a repair?

What a clean install means is that your hard drive needs to be formatted ("clean") and then you install the OS. When you do a repair install of Windows XP, it just reinstalls the configuration files and such for the OS without effecting any other files on yur hard drive.

Assuming your important files are backed up (rotflmfao). A clean install, in addition to varygoode's comments, will give you a crisp clean lean and fast PC, then you can slowly mess it all up again as we all do.