Got infected last week by a virus which "ate" all my desktop icons one by one...very surreal. Now I get "boot.ini invalid" on start-up but it also says "File recovered from C:\\Windows...." and the system continues correctly. I'm running XP and have a recovery disk but am worried that if I start this up I'll have to recreate everything ...
Any ideas/tips?
Thanks.

If you type msconfig in the start\run box, you can edit boot.ini.

Typically boot.ini will have the following lines for a system running a single operating system with Windows on the first partition of your hard drive:

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\Windows
[operating system]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\Windows="Microsoft Windows XP Professional"/fastdetect/No Execute=OptIn

The 30 is the number of seconds delay before executing, you can set this to whatever you want. If you are running XP Home, you will need to put it in place of the one shown.

After you enter the new boot.ini, click the "Check all boot paths" button and Windows will tell you if the entry is valid for your system.
If it says it isn't valid, then hit the cancel button and you will return to your current condition.

If you have a Windows XP disk [not a recovery disk, but the install disk], then Microsoft recommends this procedure:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/330184/en-us