I am now intimately acquainted with the "repair" option of the Windows XP CD setup process; the Windows Recovery Console, and the FIXMBR and FIXBOOT commands. Of those features, I believe that the Repair option wasn't really required, but I guess it didn't hurt to refresh all the Windows system files, reboot three additional times unnecessarily, and apply all the Windows Updates since SP3. I'm sure it was for the best.

In other news, if you have set up your computer for dual-boot between Windows XP and Linux using the Grub boot loader, do not use Partition Magic 8.0 to re-size the Windows NTFS partition. The consequences of this may include destroying the master boot record of the hard disk and rendering your Linux ext2 partition unrecognizable to Linux.

Now I have to re-install Ubuntu 8.10.