common bootskin issues?

I'm going on an extended trip and won't be bringing my desktop pc, so I formatted my laptop with a couple of storage partitions and reinstalled xp and have been getting everything back to the way it should be.

However, I'm encountering a mystifying issue in bootskin. I'll make one on the pc, it'll preview and boot fine on that, but when transferred over the network to the laptop and applied, it'll hang when booting.

At first I thought I simply forgot one of the necessary steps and was doing something terribly wrong in the image creation process, but then I tried the old bootskin I had been using on this laptop and that won't work either, it just freezes, depixelates horribly in the righthand side of the image, and the os won't load from there, so it's the old safe mode fix to get back into things.

I was wondering if there were any relatively common issues that might be causing a problem, or if there's just a gremlin somewhere in my machine.