I know nothing of this beast, except that a pal of mine who is blessed with it on his main PC claims that a simple CD, with just an autorun.inf and one (clean) exe file, won't run.
Having failed to autorun, he entered his drive letter and the exe file name....but still nothing apparently.
It's only a simple html file on CD, but does need Flash player installed and Javascript enabled....and yes, you've guessed it, he claims both.
Is there something "unusual" about this version of XP?

Further to the above, my pal has now tried a different CD, and it seems to work fine.
Back to trying the original CD, it's now generating a Windows message as follows :

"You cannot access the specified device, path or file. You may not have the appropriate permission"

Any ideas, please?

Further to the above, my pal has now tried a different CD, and it seems to work fine.
Back to trying the original CD, it's now generating a Windows message as follows :

"You cannot access the specified device, path or file. You may not have the appropriate permission"

Any ideas, please?

sounds like it's been user account locked, so you may have to log in as the Administrator to remove the issue.

I ran "XP Media Centre" on a Evesham PC for a couple of years for recording TV - the idea is great, but XP-MCE was a dog and if it didn't lock up every few days, I needed to reboot the damn thing to sort some issue or another...

I migrated to Vista Home Premium with some concern, but was really pleased that the MCE parts of Vista are a world apart from the earlier MCE - if your mate is using MCE to record TV and is having said difficulties, I cannot recommend Vista Home Premium enough... true, people say Vista is a dog, but I like it, it's not as power hungry as I expected and it works for me !

One thing to note - Vista doesn't like Black Gold TV cards !

Ta for your thoughts/suggestions.
Turns out to have been some aspect of his McAfee set-up, although I'm not sure as to which setting/s.