I've not been able to force myself to read the agreement details, but it does seem like there's some OEM stuff that means you get a "bargain" rate for the OS at the expense of losing your right to installation media for the standalone OS. I had a long fight once with IBM (yes, I actually bought a Win9X box from them, alas) that was based on a complaing much like the OP here.

Anyone know if there's an XP version of an old shareware app called RegClean? I vaguely recall that helping in the early NT days, but it's been too long since I largely gave up on keeping a tidy & efficient PC.

you get a "bargain" rate for the OS at the expense of losing your right to installation media for the standalone OS.

Yeah. Basically they get kickbacks from the AOL's and the Symantec's and even Microsoft to have the 90 day free trial's of this, that and the other thing. Then they top it off with a bunch of free crap that does nothing but clutter up your hard drive and start menu.

I do a fair amount of hand editing of the registry and also use Norton WinDoctor for lack of anything better, but it's not so much the registry I need help with, it's more things like what directories and sub-directories belong in c:\windows and c:\windows\system32 and which are left there by some program that I "uninstalled" but didn't have the good grace to clean up after themselves.

Not that I really expect a whole bunch of useful information here, it's just another opportunity for me to bitch about it.   

Did you have XP Pro on your other PC? You could do a compare and delete, but your looking at a lot of time. Bad thing is if you ever have to reformat, you'll either need XP Pro or have to deal with their recovery disk possibly messing up all your time invested getting rid of their crap. This is why I have been building my own for years, just can't buy a prebuilt without all the baggage.

Of course, the real solution to my problem is to go buy a fresh XP Pro install disk and format the drive and start over, but at this point I don't feel like spending another $300, plus HP will only supply drivers as part of the recovery disk. I know I can go to Asus or the DVD manufacturer for drivers if I have to. Anyway, does anyone know of a decent guide out there for stripping an OEM XP Pro image down to anything close to a fresh install of XP Pro?

I don't have a whole lot of experience with your problem, so I don't know any good guides offhand in stripping down an OS. I can however, make a few recommendations in regards to fixing your computer.

First, did your computer come with a set of disks? You might have lucked by having some of the programs don't want on several disks. That way you might be able to attempt a fresh reinstall to 'clean' your computer by not using the disks you don't need. Second, your windows installation disk might allow you to choose to install some stuff or not. Try to keep this option for latter.

Second, did you actually write down a list of programs you don't want, before you unistalled them? If you did, that would help you to clean your computer by knowing what programs, and registry values to remove.

As for actually manual cleaning, there are a few programs that might help. Just to inform you, a thorough scrub might take several days of work. So don't feel the need to remove anything just because you see it. You might want to keep it for reference for a little bit.

Lets start with HijackThis for now. I'll try some more others later.
WWW Link
--> Caution <--
This program scans programs by methods used by hacker, not by searching for any specifically known program. So I garentee you, you will find many "false positives". So unless you are a computer expert, I suggest that you ask one. You can probally post its log file here.

I need a break... There was some stuff I wanted to post as well, but I didn't want to overwhelm you at first. I'll post this now, and come back to help a little later. I'll do some research in the mean time.

Here is a link to the software I have used to clean up my reg. Worked well for me. http://www.pctools.com/registry-mechanic/

Yup i too use the Registy Mechanic program and have now even taken out the subscription for it too. I would also suggest one of the advance uninstaller products available as they also remove left over reg keys and invalid links as well.

Mumble i will add a link to the uninstall programin the Core later today. However try and find a version of Reg Mech on eBay etc for a few $'s as it will be worth it.

If you google registry mechanic you can find a key or two floating around out there for it so you don't need to pay for it. Not endorsing that idea, but if you try it and like it like that pay for it. Personally I found that it was useless and the speed increases were marginal at best and at worst the program was doing damage. Using a program to mess with your registry, I'm going to have to go with the various computer Guru's and experts out there and say that if your going to do it do it by hand otherwise you run the risk of serious problems for minimal performance gains.

Thanks for all the responses. I was really more venting than anything else. It's just that this kind of crap really annoys me. The hard part was stripping it all down which is now complete. At this point I'm just installing all the stuff I do want on the machine which is a lot more straightforward. I hope to be back playing GC2 by the weekend.

In retrospect I would have been better off going to iBuyPower.com. The same system and OS would have cost an extra $150 but the "recovery disc" is essentially just the full featured OS (which has it's own set of bloatware on it but nowhere near that of HP). Anyway, if anyone else is looking at buying a PC in the near term I would recommend them over HP in a heartbeat.

Well, if you need any future help, feel free to ask then.

HP = CompaQ = BAD!