Normally I just use the repair off the disk. It's kind of the shotgun approach to fixing a corrupt or missing file problem in xp. One of my friends in real life likes to look up the problem code on the m$ website and use the recovery console. I think I've ended up doing that once or twice.
Most of the time if a file thats necessary to the windows startup is damaged or missing the last good configuration option doesn't work. I've never used an xp startup disk. That's just asking to sit in front of a monitor for hours.