yeah I already bought it when I had just installed XP it was like $40 and I used a trial version of it and I liked all the features.

it had a specail system restore better than the traditional xp restore.

Cool

I've never tried TuneUp Utilities but it looks good from a distance.

The Disk Cleanup Compress issue is well known:

Disk Cleanup freezes during the Compressed File Phase: This edit corrects
the problem:


Disk Cleanup - Compressed Files (Row 48)
http://www.kellys-korner-xp.com/xp_tweaks.htm


To use the Regedit: Save the REG File to your hard disk. Double click it
and answer yes to the import prompt. REG files can be viewed in Notepad by
right clicking on the file and selecting Edit.

This edit affects:

[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Curr entVersion\Explorer\VolumeCaches\Compress old files]

As this is such a common issue I doubt if that edit could do much harm. Unless something was cached that shouldn't have been by some other process.

The group policy editor didn't work it kept applying the policies I set for the family account to me as well even though I had denied read right to administrators like it's documented on the link you suggested.

What if I were to try to repair windows by repairing windows or doing a reinstall over the existing windows, would that erase everything?

because I still would like to get into the other hard drive if possible, because I'm not sure what crashed it and I don't really want to put whatever did crash it unknowingly on my new hard drive.

Ok I tried to run the recovery console from my XP Disk, and I checked the disk, and it said there were errors, so I used the command fixboot, and it said it was fixed, tried to restart using the hd that had crashed and I get this error everytime, (was getting it before too) just never wrote it down:

Stop:0x0000007E (0xC0000005, 0x00000000, 0xF9C6b0E8, 0xF9C6ADE8)

what should I do?

0x0000007E: SYSTEM_THREAD_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED
(Click to consult the online MSDN article.)
A system thread generated an exception which the error handler did not catch. There are numerous individual causes for this problem, including hardware incompatibility, a faulty device driver or system service, or some software issues. Check Event Viewer (EventVwr.msc) for additional information.

http://www.aumha.org/win5/kbestop.php

A Repair Install will reload XP without affecting Programs or settings. In other words it would not affect your other user accounts. You can run a Clean install on the new drive that will wipe everything clean. This will not affect your old drive although I would recommend unplugging the old drive during the installation.

A good general install guide here: http://michaelstevenstech.com/index.html

If it is an upgrade XP CD you would need a previous Windows disk (to verify upgrade) in order to run a Clean Install.

If you want to try and troubleshoot the Group Policy we can do that as well. You might need to use the built-in Administrators account.

so if I were to repair xp it should fix the problem without losing any of my files or settings right?

Sorry I am not certain at this point what the problem is/was

Are we talking about the new drive or the old? You are correct in that a Repair Install (aka: Upgrade) will retain all programs and settings. It is still recommended to back up any important data but I have never had an issue with this method. Still I would recommend reading this:

http://michaelstevenstech.com/XPrepairinstall.htm

As well as:

How to perform an in-place upgrade (reinstallation) of Windows XP

This should also NOT alter any users settings so it is not a solution to the user settings issue.

sorry, the issue is that I would like to boot from the hard drive that crashed, by doing an XP Repair, because I would rather use my 20gb hd that crashed for primary than my 200gb, and I don't want to start copying files from the crashed hard drive onto the 200gb if they are the same files that crashed my 20 gb, but I will read the suggested links. thank you.

That should work assuming that the hard drive is not faulty or failing. You can find diagnostics here for the major manufacturers:

http://www.tacktech.com/display.cfm?ttid=287