Cannot mount image or cannot find hard discs

Delighted at last to have True Image 8 fully working again on my XP.
The problem had started not being able to mount an image. I would start the process off, password etc but after innitiating the assigning of drive letter it would hang at that point and the only way out was to hard turn off the computer. I thought 'oh no, the last 6 months or so of images I made are useless, but not so, they were able to be mounted on another computer, so no worries there. Uninstalling and reinstalling had no effect, so I went further and tried removing true image registry entries. Still no go. Turned out that an error message pointed to a bios problem where I had updated the motherboard bios with the wrong version. I corrected that but then I got a new problem where Acronis True Image 8 as soon as starting the program declared it couldn't find hard discs. Uninstalling and reinstalling did not help. But I did also have a version of Acronis Partition Expert. It turned out that the two were clashing in some way. After uninstalling both programs [it was necessary to reboot between each], removing Acronis folders from program files and emptying recycle bin for good measure, I reinstalled True Image 8 and everything worked properly again, and the best bit is that it remembered my regular incremental image settings onto my external hard drive, so was able to continue from where I had left off, despite all the problems while I had not been able to mount so the only time I have not got the incremental image points is at the time that I had been unable to create an image due to the cannot find hard drives episode. So to summarise, if problems arise, there may be some incompatability between True Image and Partition Expert, needing BOTH to be uninstalled, before reinstalling True Image.