Even if you were doing it as an 'upgrade' or 'repair'? Need to know as I will have to do this sooner or later i.e keep all existing programs and settings but transfer to a new PC. I have had this done by IBM when they came around our department and upgraded all the PC's. Everything ran flawlessly on the new PC's with no losses of anything I could determine.
Right, I wouldn't use it as a long term solution. Btw, I put the HD into a completely new setup. New MoBo (different brand), CPU, video card, sound, etc. I used it for about a month, and later I put the HD back in the old computer and it was fine.
Only if the new computer uses the same Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) as the broken one. Windows NT based systems (Win2000/WinXP/Vista) are all very picky about having the right system files and registry entries. If not, the blue screen of death is a frequent occurrence on boot up. Sometimes you have to boot with the Windows CD and do a "Repair" to get things to work. I'm only touching the surface here, there's loads of info on the net and at Microsoft's site about all of the different hardware/software mismatch issues and how to correct them.
The big issue is that it remembers your disk drive configuration (partitions etc). I've got around it in the past by just partitioning the new disk exactly like the old one. But this article gives you a good understanding of the options. http://www.goodells.net/multiboot/partsigs.htm