Here's a good tutorial of how to change your XP (home or prof) boot screen, for those who dont know a boot screen is, you know why you turn on your computer it says windows XP with the logo? well that is the XP boot screen... now you can customise this screen by following a tutorial on this site:

http://www.thetechguide.com/howto/xpbootlogo/

it is intended for XP prof, although works fine with home (read it, it says!).

the program needed is resource hacker, a totaly safe, legal tool - i swear! and you will need something like Paint Shop Pro or Photoshop to make the image, you need one of these as you need to import the palet (again, read the site).

all the downloads (resource hacker and the .pal files) are all safe, i found out by testing em myself!

please rememeber that the end image MUST be in 16 colour format, this is easy to set in PhotoShop, the 16 colour format does however mean that it is effectively pointless to have images involved as they will be abismal quality.

it is all easy to do, just follow the manual....