After a week or two of fighting with my computer as Explorer constantly locks up as I right click on something or hit Delete, I finally got fed up with it and decided a format/reinstall was the next course of action.

I dislike having to start over from scratch, as much as the next man (or woman!), but it does have its good points. Your system runs 10x faster as there’s no corruption in the registry, there’s no bloat from all the crap software you’d installed, and everything is installed from scratch instead new versions on top of each other etc.

So, late Friday evening, after I’d backed up my Profile folder and Program Files (just in case!), I stuck in my XP SP2 CD and started the fresh install. Saturday morning I carried on with the reinstallation of all my drivers and some of my software. I installed my NVIDIA nForce drivers to get my on-board network card working, then checked the NVIDIA website and discovered there were newer drivers! Typical! Why on each I didn’t check before I formatted that I don’t know.

Anyway… things seemed to be going right… till I installed the latest version of Norton AntiVirus – 2005. I’d never used it before, it’s only been out a few weeks and I hoped it would be better than 2004 which I’d been using for months.

I also reinstalled Firefox 1.0PR and tried to install all the extensions I use, which caused me no end of trouble with one of them, which so buggered up Firefox I had to remove it and reinstall it again. I did work out that I can copy my entire backed up profile into the Firefox profile folder which is great as ALL my settings are then retained – I’m sure I’ve tried doing that before with an older version and I lost all my saved passwords, maybe they’ve fixed it now (or I did something wrong).

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaanyway… all seemed to be OK with NAV2005… till after a few reboots, something went awry. NAV no longer worked! I tried to uninstall it, no joy. I tried to reinstall it, no joy. I tried removing it manually – don’t try this. You’ll bugger up your entire system as it infects the registry like a virus (there are references freakin’ everywhere!!).

I got so fed up with NAV, I decided that since I’d only installed a few pieces of software and nothing major, I could stand to format and reinstall XP again. It shouldn’t take me that long to get back to where I was, because I already knew what problems I may face and how to fix them easily.

I even burned a brand new copy of XP, freshly slipstreamed with SP2 and “corporated”, this time [i]without[/i] the 3 files I’d added to the disc which had been hacked by someone on the Internet to disable Windows File Protection, enable unsigned Themes, and remove the TCP/IP connection limit. Considering I usually use StyleXP to apply my themes and haven’t noticed any problems with the TCP/IP limit it seemed silly to have them anyway.

It must be safer not to apply unofficial hacked files anyway. Who knows if they were actually causing any of my problems?

I reinstalled XP, reinstalled all my drivers, installed a few bits of software and then had the bright idea of installing Ghost 2003 and taking a backup of my system as it stood so that I could get back to a working system a lot quicker than formatting and reinstalling XP yet again! Probably the best idea I had all weekend LOL!

I haven’t reinstalled NAV2005, and I’m not sure I even want to. At least I’ve got a partly working system again. I’ve just gotta be careful not to bugger it all up again, but now I’ve got a Ghost backup it shouldn’t take so long to get back up and running if I do!