Whistler question - HP system recovery discs

I recently purchased a set of system recovery cd's from HP for a Pavillion
XT931. The recovery process completes but on restart always winds up
missing a critical file that prevents startup. Each recovery process has
missed a different file ie; hal.dll one time, biosinfo.inf another time,
<Windows>\system32\config\system... There is no way to disable shadowing or
cache in the bios. I have tried retail versions of XP Home, XP Professional
as well, with file copy errors stopping the install process (solved on other
machines by disabling shadowing and cache). I have just completed a
successful install of Win2003 Server Enterprise... wtf?????

Upon examination of the hard disk after running HP's recovery set, boot.ini
shows "Windows Whistler"... when forcing up the startup menu, that is also
what appears in the OS Startup options. I didn't think MS RTM'ed XP Home
under the code name of Whistler. Was this a beta release of XP? If so, what
is HP doing selling beta operating system disks as recovery discs?

Thanks for your help.
steve