Hey there, dilk, welcome to the site!
Don't worry about this being in the wrong forum; this is the general chat forum, so you can talk about ANYTHING you want here - as long as it isn't against the forum rules.
Many people have problems getting BOTF to work on XP, but is IS possible. To be honest though, I've never had - or heard of people having - any problems with installing the game.
Are there any scratches or anything on the disk? Fingerprints could also cause problems.
...Don't worry about it though. There's an alternative available for you.
Over on the BOTF section of the parent site of these forums, there is a downloadable copy of BOTF that doesn't require the CD. It is illegal to download it if you haven't already bought the game, but you obviously don't have to worry about that.
To download it, you have to first log into the site; access to the downloads section is restricted to only those who are logged in. There's no such worries with the downloads section of these forums though.
Once you've logged in (And signed up if necessary) click on the downloads button at the top of the screen, then click on the Birth Of The Federation 1.0 Backup link. That will take you to the download of the .iso copy of the game.
I haven't actually downloaded it myself, so i'm not 100% sure how you install it though. You need to mount it as a virtual drive on your computer with a program like Daemon tools. You'll have to ask someone else for help on that though.
Using the .iso copy of the game is supposed to be better than using the disk because it is faster, (No loading times for the CD) so it'll probably improve your playing experience. I don't know what modding it is like either.
Good luck with getting the game to work, anyways.
