How about booting in safe mode. I believe that this allows you access (under administrator) to change any and all permissions on user folders. I had a pc that died; rescued the old hard drive that way. See at:
http://ask.metafilter.com/mefi/30189
especially the comment about "Taking Ownership".
Good luck!
A few notes:
a) The first thing you need to do, is get your data back. as an administrator on the windows xp, you can add or remove users from the NTFS permission list to access the folder and subfolders. It happened to me once and the fix wasn't too hard, I can't remember the details now (I'm on linux at the moment) but it wasn't too hard - on second thought, I've found a link that will give you the full details on how to solve this:
http://pcsupport.about.com/od/
pc...claimfolder.htm
http://www.windowsecurity.com/
tu...a_Security.html
b) When linux is installed, the loading time is less, BTW - some live cds take less time to load, a lot less.
c) Installing linux on a laptop is harder than installing it on a PC. the unique hardware configuration of each laptop might cause trouble.
the best approach is to google the name of the laptop model and the word linux and find out if some of the hardware doesn't work in linux. it wouldn't be nice to find that you've formated to OEM windows just to find out that the specific wireless adapter isn't supported under linux.
check this site for more info:
http://www.linux-on-laptops.com/
d) the upside of linux is that python is a lot more native there 
all in all, Ubuntu is a nice distro, you should defenetely give it a try. you could also try a duel boot option on your pc.
Thanks for all the advice guys. I'm sure I'll find a fix here.
And thanks for the advice about Linux on a laptop. Definitely worth a bit of research before a purchase.
Commenting by HaloScan
