Why hello, everyone!
Due to a long and complicated chain of events, my laptop was cheerfully looking like it had some serious driver corruption issues (it was actually fine, long story)
SOOOOoooo.... naturally, I just figured "okay, no problem" and proceeded to give winnt32 in the i386\ directory a try at uninstall. Long story short, microsoft killed my laptop. 
Having an inadviseable amount of unsecured credit despite having almost no annual income (if you'd like a job, let me know, lol), I promptly bought a pavillion which I am now posting this from... but, the 110mini, my favorite laptop, is... still a paperweight. 'n it has all my good files on it.
Since then, I have of course learned that NFTS is an evil scheme to keep you from fixing your laptop and that every single *nix boot disk wants to install, not boot, which has been frustrating. Nonetheless, here's the process of events in the reboot loop...
1. HP screen comes on. F9 does great at letting me boot from USB, but MSDOS/FreeDOS/*nix boot sticks are so far unhelpful despite heroic measures.
2. WinXP first load screen comes on just fine. F8 usually works well, but none of the options actIfually perform much better - "safe mode" replaces the reboot loop with, well, a blacck screen of death with the words "safe mode" in each corner, but does not actually load.
3. Large blue screen says setup is continuing.
4. Screen goes black. Mouse cursor shows up. Alt-Tab and Ctrl-Alt-Delete show no activity or task manager.
5. A message pops up saying that virtual memory is, like, way too low, man... briefly.
6. System reboots, see step 1.
If I could access the filesystem from any OTHER boot system, I'd just see if winnt32 would like to give it another try, or see what I could manually edit. 'n for that matter, chkdsk the drive, just to get a *nix boot going on the side as a nice insurance policy. As it stands, however... it is the most beautiful and expensive useless paperweight in existance, apparently.
'n just to clarify, the laptop was later confirmed to have been perfectly fine before winnt32 bricked it. Thoughts?