Putterin' 'Puter

My dear friend Emily is having computer issues-- we figure that the answer is to just get a new computer, but I'll put it up in case anyone's a genius or Dell savant.

She's got an "ancient" Dell, I believe an Inspiron, and Windows XP Pro. It's been a little sluggish, so I suggested she install SP3, which Jeremy and I just installed with success. She said she'd never done SP2 because it had killed a lot of computers (HP) at Agnes Scott. She's been trying without success to install SP2 (after my assurances that Dells were made for Windows) for about a week now-- it'll get all the way done installing and then go "fail!"

Any thoughts?