During my reinstall of windows xp media center i am prompted to instal a 'windows xp professional service pack 2 cd'. I never remember doing this before and cannot locate any such cd. Will cancelling this procedure cause xp to be installed in correctly? what else can you tell me about this prompt and how to get through it without this cd?
it's now saying it needs an 'asms' file....also, i've only seen where that cd can be ordered for like $5, where can you get it free?
does the extracted file need to be burned onto a cd any special way? regular data disc or,...bootable cd or wht? and if something other than a regular disc, how?

Your installation cd should already have service pack 2 - if you took it out, just put it back in and it should work but if not, the disk is free to order from mircosoft

You could go to another computer, download the redist of sp2 ( http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=049C9DBE-3B8E-4F30-8245-9E368D3CDB5A&displaylang=en )
extract it and burn it to a cd. To extract it, open up a command prompt (Start->Run->CMD) and go to wherever you saved it (save it to c:\sp2 to save yourself some time) and go there and put in "WindowsXP-KB835935-SP2-ENU.exe -x" then hit enter. It should extract the contents into the current folder. Burn to CD and done.

In the future you can use nlite to slipstream sp2 into the install so you dont run into issues like this

http://www.nliteos.com/