I would like to thanks everyone for your help. i haven't resolved the issue yet but i'm hoping to soon. i really hope that i don't have to do a reinstall of windows xp though because i have too much stuff that i just can't back up (settings etc). my only other route at the moment is to buy a cheap hard drive, take out my C drive and install windows on this so i can at least get the encoding done. That will have to wait until the end of the month when we get paid though. hopefully it won't have to come to that.

To everyone that kindly PM'd me recently then i'm sorry but i haven't had a chance to reply as yet because of everything that is going on here, but i will reply as soon as possible.