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Ok, so I had my PC working on a 40 gb hard-drive.

It used to have Windows 98SE on it, and when I told it to shut-down it physically turned the PC off, which was damned handy. Then I upgraded to Win XP Home using an upgrade disk, and suddenly it didn't do this anymore, instead telling me "It is now safe to turn off your computer" or something to that effect. I accepted that it worked in a different way and that I would just have to turn it off manually. I happily did this for a good six months or so.

Anyways it started to play up, and was full of rubbish, bad sectors and spyware so I decided to reformat the hard-drive.

Whilst doing this I decided to take the opportunity to buy a new 80Gb hardrive and slave it, installing my operating system and programs to the old smaller hard-drive, and media to the new larger one, thus speeding the pc up and giving me more storage space and better backup opportunities.

I reinstalled Win 98SE on the 40gb drive as master, then upgraded it straight away to XPHome. All works fine, the strange behaviour being that now XP has no qualms about turning my pc off when I tell it too

I'm certainly not complaining, but has anybody got any clues as to why? I would be less confused if I had installed the operating system on the new drive

On certain systems XP has the same bug that plauged WindowsMe...

niether have been setup for a manual shutdown, so you just click Turn-Off rather than Reboot and it'll just shut down and switch itself off.

however depending on how much data you have depends on how long it takes to achieve this, also how much Ram you are using also affects how long it takes to dump the physical ram (safely) ... rather than just wiping XP & ME took a little while to actually unload everything.
if you leave it to do its thing, then it actually improves the speed of your computer and means you have less scandisc needs and such.

however there is also the little problem that sometimes it can't unload a program and it hangs (usually happens when you do an upgrade install over your old windows rather than a full installation or upgrade with an additional windows)

service pack 1a also solves some other power related bugs

That's just windows being it's usual buggy self. Updateing is proberly a bad idea unless you can't avoid it. If you have to do it after a format and install of the first os.
Win98 self destructs on a lot of computers. I have a computer that stops shutting down after about 30-40 days of use.

Now you have formated it it is too late to find out what did it. Could be anything from a random windows bug to installing motherboard drivers that didn't work correctly.

I've installed SP1 and it didn't do any good, although now as I say it works fine.

Unfortunately I could only afford a WinXP Upgrade disk at the time and I don't like using pirate software

Strangly although it works fine now as far as turning off goes, EVERY fickin time I go to shut down, (having already shut down all programs first) it brings up a "Windows could not shut EXPORER.exe click End Now or wait 30 seconds" - Having fiddled around with control Alt+Delete I have found that manually closing Expolrer.exe removes the start button and taskbar! Other than that tho, Windows is running very smoothly, and I'd personally rather this than have to turn it off manually, Now I can just click Shutdown and leave it to take its time turning off

xp is not sending a terminate power message to your machine like the power managment in 98se.

Yeah I figured it was something like that. Seems to be fixed now, although like I said the seemingly irrelevant explorer message is interesting It works perfectly, just doesn't want to shut the exe, but doesn't cause any actual errors or non responding messages when shutting down or rebooting..