Looping at startup

the other day i made a stupid move...
here it is..
my hp laptop running vista was whining about low memory so of course i searched around for things to delete. well... i'm usually pretty safe with my computer so i figured hey....i dont need this huge back-up file on my recovery drive (d so i decided to delete it. soon after that i opened a file labeled "RECOVERY" out of curiosity and its an image with a little bit of text. scrolling around i ended up clicking on the picture at the top which instantly had a "Paint" type border to it. andddddd....i accidently drew this huge black line through it and couldn't undo.

anywayssss...now when it starts up i get the whole hp bs and it loops that screen over and over again..it never makes it as far as the blinking cursor or the loading screen for vista. i wanna just say screw vista and put good 'ol xp on it. any help would be much appreciated.

You can't possibly blame Vista for that... even if it were an XP computer, if you had messed around the way you did, you still would be having the same issues. My recommendation would be to contact HP and obtain the recovery media so that you can restore your recovery partition. It might not hurt to try and get a generic OEM disc as well (as per MGD's suggestion) to perform a clean install of the OS. After all... the bloatware that HP adds to the installation doesn't help Vista's performance.