It's easy to go overboard with file deletion and Registry cleaning, that is if you don't take care to back up what you're deleting or editing, and if you're too quick to delete what you backed up.  I got a dose of what can happen as a result.

I was trying to manually remove Word 2000 after its uninstaller went haywire.  Not only would the uninstaller not work correctly, it started running whenever I tried to use MP3Gain, an audio program that has nothing to do with Word or its uninstaller, or shouldn't.

All the usual disk and Registry tools failed to sort out the stupidity of it all.  So I set about removing Word 2000, one file at a time, using a Microsoft how-to for a guide.

I used the Search tool to find the Office files.  It found them alright, but it also found files with variations of the names I was looking for.  This is where I should have been paying special attention to the search results.  I was sending files to the Recycle Bin and flushing it about as fast.  As one result, I killed the Services applet.  I probably ruined other things too, but I didn't look around long enough to see the full scope of the damage I'd caused.

Other stuff had been wrong as well, like a strange "device installer error" message that kept coming up when I clicked on the Properties for IDE ATA / ATAPI controllers in Device Manager.  This started happening weeks before the Word problem, but it was all adding up to a messed up Windows XP that I couldn't fix, short of a reinstall.

<Note: I found the cause of the "device installer error".  It's at this section called Device Installer Error in Device Manager - mystery solved.  I even managed to make sense of the weirdness surrounding the installer for Word 2000... more here.>

I decided to take it as an opportunity to start over.  It felt, as it has before, that I had a broken OS on my hands, and that I had broken it, though most programs continued to work fine.  When I get this feeling, there is something in me that wants to tear the whole thing down and rebuild, which I did.

I used my Winzip-based batch file to archive all my important docs and app settings.  I even used the Files And Settings Transfer Wizard to make a second backup.  Then I dumped it all onto CDRW disks.

Then Mr. Overkill really stepped in.  I rebooted the system from a floppy and used an old DOS version of Symantec's WipeInfo to do a secure delete of everything on the hard drive, secure enough for me anyway.  Then came an unconditional format and an FDISK.  Hmmm... any chance we can recover this data??? :-)

So now we reinstalled XP.  No issues here, beyond the usual-- the time, a couple of hours just for the reinstall part.  But I have to hand it to MS and their OS.  It took its time but as ever it, found all my hardware without whining about it.

I feel relief when I hear the music at the end of an XP installation.  It tells me that the wait is over and that I can quit staring at the screen and get on with the normal post-install chores.

The first of these was to install the latest version of Zone Alarm.  I'd already experienced what happens when you run XP for too long without a firewall.  Ever heard of Teekids.exe?  I hadn't, until an earlier re-installation when XP came up with a timed shutdown warning message, and when I later found the little rodent under the startup tab of MSCONFIG, plus its executable in c:\windows\system32.  Teekids is a care package that the W32.Blaster.C.Worm will deliver if allowed.  Zone Alarm put a gag on its outgoing calls, then I finished it off.

After the firewall came a visit to Windows Update--  and that's where the real fun started.  MS had made some changes to their update pages, and I kept getting “Update Now” and “Administrators only” messages, the last one being the most persistent, even after I followed all of Microsoft's suggestions for fixing the problems using their Windows Update Troubleshooter.  What finally got Update to work, was to rename a Catroot2 folder and set Cryptographic Services to Automatic.  These steps weren't even meant for my specific problem; they were on another MS support page that addressed some related Windows Update issues.

After that, everything went ok… no real trouble, apart from the usual time needed to reinstate programs and their settings.  Even the Word 2000 reinstall went fine… And these days it doesn't interfere with MP3Gain, probably because I've kept hands off most of Word's files and Registry keys. Clever boy! :)  I also did an absolute minimal reinstall; by the time I'd selected all the Word components, only 46mb were used on disk.  And the actual installation took less than two minutes I'm sure.  After that, I went all out and installed all of the Office/Word 2000 updates as well.  This was probably not needed, but it made me feel like I had a whole application.