Thanks for all of that valuable information. You raise many true points.

I am back in business now and the solution for me was actually unexplained. What I did was repeat what I had been trying when I first started this project. I tried running the repair feature on the Vista disc again and when you first launch it, obviously it didn't see any OS since I had deleted those so I went on to the next step where it will try to repair the necessary boot files. At the end it says to reboot and if all is well you will be back up and running and if not *repeat* this procedure another time. I had missed that the first time trying this.

I ended up running through this 3 times in a row and then all of a sudden I saw my initial (XP) partition show up again as the primary partition..it still was listed as unallocated space, but it had primary after it, which I had not had previously had. I then chose to try loading Vista onto that partition thinking it wouldn't take it and low and behold it did. I am up and running again.

Now I need to search for some decent partitioning software for Vista because I still need to reclaim that old Vista partition and using the built in doesn't let me reclaim all of that one, only a chunk of it. The partition that Vista is on is already telling me I have very low disc space, which I figured since it is only 20GB.

Thanks again for the help, I do appreciate it. I will hop over to some other threads to see what works the best for Vista.