Another thing we can try is booting off of your Windows XP installation disc..
If you can see information on the screen when booting off the disc, then that means your monitor is ok, and you can proceed to troubleshooting other components.
Most systems, by default, are set to boot from the optical drive, so if you place your installation disc into the computer and restart it should boot off the disc..
In the mean time, you may want to take your hard drive out and add it as a slave drive to another computer... Boot up the computer and copy your important files from the hard drive over to a thumb drive or something..
Quick tutorial on "slaving" a hard drive..
http://freepctech.com/pc/001/installing_ide_devices.shtml