How can I cancel XP setup? Corrupt XP Setup – trying to remove setup by logging on from another disk

I mistakenly launched XP Setup and want to know how to stop it from progressing further. I have another XP installed on another virtual disk. Rebooting from there allowed me delete the Setup files. Or so I thought ! The main XP installation however continues to try to launch Setup. Just about whatever I do, it ends in tears. My question is … how do I stop XP on this disk from thinking it has to launch Setup? I don’t want to reinstall XP, as that will involve a huge amount of work to recreate my environment.

I am able to choose my operating system when I press F8

If I launch the corrupt system in “safe mode” or “domain controllers”, everything appears to progress normally until the very end… when the XP black desktop appears (and just before the icons appear). At that point I get the error message
“Windows XP cannot run under safe mode” and I am asked to click OK to consult a log file. The screen however is actually frozen at that point, so I have to unplug the machine.

Otherwise if I launch in debugging mode or “Last known good configuration”m I get a message saying “Setup will restart now” and then “ Setup is being restarted…” while the usual XP installation logos start to appear e.g. “An exciting new look etc…”. Shortly afterwards I get
“An error that has been encountered that prevents setup from continuing ”,
Again the screen freezes so I need to unplug the machine.

I looked at the difference config and ini files, and compared the Windows directories on both disks, also looking for hidden files. I looked at the log files…
setuplog.txt refers to this command, but I can’t file neither the file nor the folder (nor is the corrupt setting on D)
d:\xpsprtm\base\ntsetup\syssetup\syssetup.c,6434,BEGIN_SECTION,Installing Windows NT

setupact.log
The critical system information file K:\WINDOWS\system32\$winnt$.inf is corrupt or missing

Any ideas very welcome ! Thanks!