I looked in the help ans support section and they said to reinstall it by doing an upgrade.
but it did the same as if I was trying to do a clean install : xp setup could not find all the necessary setup fileson the cd.
I do not know why it does this, everyone seems to have no problem doing fresh installs, but I can't.
so anyway, I decided to restart and leave it as it was but everytime I started it gave me a choice to start win xp or win xp setup, and inside xp, some peripherals were not working anymore, like my network card, xp could not install it for some reason, so they suggested to go on the net to download the drivers, but internet does not work if your network card is not installed properly obviously.
so I formatted, had to install 98 before installing xp so that's where I'm at.
everything works fine for now, I converted from fat32 to ntfs after installing xp, hoping the small but annoying problems will stop happening, if I could do a fresh install I would as it is probably what causes xp to do weird things.