Compaq restore works well.

[shawners]

I had problems with Internet explorer, moving slugish, ad-aware, spyware, malicious bugs.. And had norton keeping them out, but saw my outlook express get hit hard with virus and norton was deleteing after deleteing.. So i did a restore that kept everything i had on my pc, while restoring all the factory stuff back from beginning.. Imagine my suprise, turning it on, going through windows setup, clicking on the EULA and opening up my mp3' folders and having gigs of music and unchanged.. The only difficult things their is, is you have to restore settings like display, and i had to redownload norton again, for some reason it wouldnt work.. and all the programs act like its the first time you used them, but your settings are still saved into it. Overall it was about an hour to restore, and wait for windows to boot. Now i have to download a program to protect my pc from bugs/virus, and reupdate windows with its security patches.. i have a years worth to download.. thank God for DSL.

[shawners]

and anything you got off the net, that needs to have a serial number installed wont work, like for example acrobat and photoshop or thing of that nature..

[Malicious Intent]

I expect lavasoft would object to their program being in a list with spyware and malicious bugs. lol - Iknow what you mean.
Anyway, I'm glad you didn't lose any music and good luck getting all your programs working again. Sounds to me like the perfect oppotunity to upgrade them all!

[nasrules]

So you basically did a re-install that didn't delete your My Documents folder? That's pretty good...

I've used the WinXP recovery something in the past, which re-installs Windows but keeps your program and your My Documents folder. That was very useful at the time.

[RJ5500]

Since I have multiple hard-drives, I usually just backup & move my important data (ex. mp3s) to a seperate partition.

Then it's safe to re-install the OS that I am reinstalling (or first-time installing).