Okay, I've done it. I followed Gina's guidelines over here at Lifehacker:
http://www.lifehacke...m-scratch-157578.php and everything went amazingly straightforwardly.
Though I've followed the advice of creating a separate partition for my documents etc and OS/program files, I've never quite believed that this was useful: it certainly is! I didn't realise I would only have to reformat the OS/program files partition, so my data was perfectly untouched. I made an image of the data partition on my snazzy new 250gb Lacie drive, and for good measure dragged-and-dropped it there also.
Now, with a clear system, I am slowly working through the Belarc Advisor system profile and reinstalling the programs I elected to keep - less that half! I am installing each program with Total Uninstall, and I intend to use it every time I install anything, so that I can keep things as clean as possible. Even with this very select group of chosen programs for installation, I am finding that I want to dump some things - for instance, although I have re-installed WindowBlinds 5, a short search of available themes for it has left me very disappointed, so I am using the (to my eye) beautiful MS Royal theme.
As I expected, even though I had carefully prepared for this over a few days, I found in the end that I did miss one important thing: my Roboform data, which I thought was in the Documents partition, but must have been in C;/Documents and Settings/etc. That's a bit of a pain, but I will survive it.
What is really unexpected is the difference in operating temperature! I use Speedfan to monitor HD and system temp., and it has fallen significantly since I reinstalled. About two months ago, when my system repeatedly fell-over while playing Civilization IV, as well as constantly making a deafening noise, I took out the heat-sink and cleaned everything up, removing about a cats-worth of hair and muck from the fans and filters. At that point, it was running at 70-80 degrees C. I put everything back together, and since then it has run at about 48 degrees C, climbing over the past few weeks to 51-53 degees. Today, completely clean and only partially reinstalled, it's idling at 31 degrees as I type!
Thanks for suggestions and support on my brief odyseey into Reinstall Land.
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, something I have avoided doing for ages, but there seem to be just too many little things broken right now, and I want a clean start. However, I'm worried about drivers and updates and having to spend hour after hour searching for the most current versions. Can anyone recommend a program for cataloguing current drivers etc? I use Belarc Advisor, and that seems very good indeed, but it doesn't allow you to actually backup what it catalogues, so if there is something that can directly backup to CD, that would be excellent.