I have an Acer Aspire 5102 (5100 series) wich came with Vista Home Basic, I'm pretty unhappy with vista because the drivers for ati x1100 graphics adapter aren't all that grate and overall it makes the laptop slower.

I want to install Windows XP but I don't know what's going to happen with the recovery partition, can it be remade if I delete it, will it do something if I erase Vista and install XP? Can I install XP now and still e able to chose between it and vista at startup, will a bootloader from a linux distribution help see both XP and Vista if XP is installed after Vista and to acomplish this is there a safe Partitioning program that works in vista (like partition magic).

i don't know about the downgrading, BUT I do know about those laptops, my girlfriend own one with windows xp and its still gonna be slow as crap, i'd stay with vista. Oh and by the way i've slaved over that computer hours and hours and hours trying to get it to work right, the thing comes with so many bugs and crashes all the time, when we bought it, it worked great but after about 3 months it will randomnly crash if not connected to the power chord. So I'd stay with what you got.

Personally I don't recommend running both OS's on the hard disk, but that is your preference.

I would do a clean install of XP. Format the HD and install XP as normal.
Get ready for a crapload of updates. I hope you have broadband. I just reinstalled it on my father's system and there were around 76 updates.

I don't know what exactly it is that you demand from a laptop but I've seen it with XP on and it works grate, maybe you still have norton internet security installed or something

I still don't know what the deal is with that recovery partition, before I recreate all the partitions I want to know what it is, unfortunately acer's website didn't provide too many clues..

simple. If your laptop didn't come with a full recovery cd (not just the drivers, i meant OS + drivers etc) then that recovery partition is usually where Acer keeps an image of your hdd as it left the factory at.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recovery_partition

you can delete it if you don't want vista on your laptop, or you have a vista cd you can recover from in the future (given that you want to go back to vista) then format the drive and reinstall xp on it.

However, do note that asking acer for them to send a recovery cd (for free and without any sort of problems), is... lets just say you're more likely to get struck by lightning and getting electrocuted by your pc in the same day..

Acer will sell you a copy of the recovery disc as long as the original computer is under warranty, or until they run out of they minimal stock, whichever happens sooner.
You may have driver problems for your ACER in changing to Windows XP, so check to be sure they are all available... or that you can identify the motherboard, etc.
You are likely not going to have any real improvement in switching to Windows XP... as that has been a troubled laptop.