helllo,
i am in serious trouble.
I own an ibm thinkpad t60 and was running windows xp sp2. my computer was having some weird problems so i did the system repair with the windows xp startup cd. the repair and everything seemed to go just fine until... after the repair the system rebooted and from there the computer won't start. It just shows the "windows xp professional" startup page and it looks as if it is going to load but it stays there forever and ever. i've tried running it in the safe mode with no luck and i am stuck. what am i supposed to do!?!? i know that i have the option of reformatting but i would really really like to avoid that because there are some files that i would like to retrieve (And i was stupid enough to not back it up before repairing...)
please please please help.

You sound like you are now at that place and time where it would be GOOD to have a friend with a computer.

You can remove your hard drive, set the jumper to 'slave', install it in the friends computer, copy your files, and then re-install it as master in yours and format etc.

You can also use a rescue disk to access the files and copy off to your cd/dvd.

Explaining HOW to make one of those is not my thing - tutorials aplenty on-line.

you may have already lost your files with the recovery CD, as some OEM's
reformat the HD and return the system to the day-1 condition, ie: none of your
data!
You should have seen a warning to that effect, so maybe you're just fine -- let's hope so.

Here's how I got my files off a dead system;

you will need to wait for the CD to arrive (~1 week), but if it's important to you,
it's worth the wait