XP Pro Services wont auto start?

Hi,

I just installed XP Pro on a friends PC from a Dell OEM cd, because theyd lost their original dell recovery discs, and for some bizarre reason a lot of services refuse to start on boot.

To name the key ones, network connections and themes services wont start unless you manually go into administration and start them, even when set to automatic. Also, msconfig.exe is apparently not installed, and some of the services required for windows updates wont even start regardless of their settings in administration.

There were a couple of disc reading errors while I did the install, but retrying the files seemed to get them going smoothly again. I didnt skip anything out, so I don't see where anything could have been missed.

Any ideas? The only thing I can think of would be trying an install with a different optical drive (since its apparently a drive issue that the files wont read, because hes had some problems with the drive in the past) but I don't have another SATA drive handy.