There goes another one..;) I do sympathize, I've spent the most of 2 decades watching this happen to clients.
I'm a bit puzzled about the XP being professional, and the CD being 'home'? Unless I'm missing something, the CD is hardware; as long as the drivers are available, the CD should work. You can usually download the drivers from the company that made the CD.
Safe mode would be a good idea, it skips a lot of the extraneous files. As long as you're not getting messages like 'kernel error', etc., you should be able to get something back.
I'm not sure about XP Pro (we have a server build, so we do reimages off the network), but on NT and other operating systems, there's usually a 'repair' option, that you can run off the original CD's..this fixes a lot of problems.
Last/bruteforce/option- just made that name up, but a thought; if you go up to the header here for the Poser forum, download the graph that good Dr. Geep created, you could find the filename extensions and make sure you back them up (getting the paths right might be another problem, but it's a last-ditch effort).
I've lost stuff on a hard drive before (back in the 386 days, and even more in the 286 and 8088 chipset days..tol' ya I go back..;), so I'm a firm beleiver in backups..I have CDs, 250meg tape backups (a lost cause, since I don't have a tape drive, but lesson learned..use a commonly available backup medium)..hope I haven't bored anyone too much..;)

I wish I'd said that.. The Staircase Wit

anahl nathrak uth vas betude doth yel dyenvey..;)