I want to set up my parents computer so it is similar to my dell. Where you can press F11 on boot up and have it basically reformat itself back to just windows and its drivers. Can I do this with the windows xp disk by setting up a hardware profile to revert too? Does this make any sense? haha.

You would probably need Norton Ghost or other third-party program, at least as far as I know.

A program that writes a desired image of windows on a small partition on the drive, and when activated (via F11 or whatever on boot-up), reformats the drive to the desired image, whilst still maintaining the said image backup for future use.

Ah okay. I wasn't sure if that required another program or not. I figured it was just a part of windows I never used. Thanks Cados. Me love you long time mr pally!

There is the part of XP that allows you to go back to a previous image. "Windows System Recovery" I think is the correct term. But it doesn't allow you to access it upon reboot and a key sequence.