Frolicking with Vista - 2 - How Not To Do It

So yesterday was a long day, Im way behind in doing me mates church a website and was meant to be working on that al day. However I decided to try out the new Orcas CTP. Mistake, started installing it and the .Net Framework 3.5 install failed. Not only did it fail but it corrupt my entire ASP.Net. DOH. So I could no longer code. So I tried to do repair installs on all my frameworks, but nahdah. So, I decided to get my spare HDD installed into my machine, and configured it to be my main hdd and successfully installed Vista as I thought this would be quicker than trying to fix my XP's. Now I tried to do a clean install of Vista by doing a bodge However when i tried to activate with my official key it failed and told me i had to do an upgrade from XP :( So I was gutted, I then tried to reboot into my old XP's using the bootcfg app I posted on del.icio.us the other day but they fail to load. So Im currently royally screwed. Cant get to old boots and new vista although working fine won't activate, looks like I'm going to have to format all 3 OS drives, then install XP on 2 of them and then upgrade one of those for Vista, oh the joy. At least Ill get another storage drive out of it ....