I discovered that this only occurs when there is a disk in the dvd drive which is set to master. If i remove the disk the system boots just fine. If the disk is in the slave it also boots fine. I thought it might have something to do with the boot sequence but that doesn't seem to be the problem.
I took my cpu to the shop and they confirmed that this was indeed happening but they seemed as confused as me and had know solution.
Any ideas why this would happen?
by the way. i did consult you guys on the error and i did download a patch for xp which stopped the error from showing every time i booted up but that was before i discoved that the disk in the drive was causing the problem.