Mike.Garfield

Ok. I have solved the problem. I have completely given up on Vista and upgraded (and yes, the word is upgraded) to XP. My Dell XPS is now a fabulous, fast and easy to use machine. Can't understand why Dell recommends Vista, their kit is sooo much better without the additional burden. All my software now works again, I've got back 40Gb of disk space (30% of my hard drice capacity). I recommend this solution, if I had done this when I first had the problem I would have saved a week of my life trying to fix the Vista problems. After my initial post in August last year, I put my 'problem' machine aside while I tried to fix it and used an old machine, it finally had a hard disk crash last week, forcing me to do something about the Vista machine. Don't hesitate, just get out your copy of XP and do it!

I tried the scripts to give admin rights but the deletion step still did not work (very good instructions on this thread - the scripts run perfectly) - the OS still denies access to the directories. And 'whereisit' is a very useful product, I'll use it more than windows search (which whether you have indexing switched on or off is a woefull component of this lame operating system). Various people on this thread have warned that certain updates and hotfixes may not work, this doesn't seem to be a serious threat to me as windows update seem to only work 50% of the time anyway. As one person has already commented, it's already broken so we aren't going to make it any worse. It took me 3 attempts to get SP1 to load for example. As before on this thread, the spirit of having all versions of DLL's and other unique files for applications has some merit, but why do I need 5 copies of the games? And why protect all 5 copies of the games and prevent deletion? Besides, I have original disks for everything so worst case I can reload it all anyway.... As this is the performance and maintenance forum, is there anyone out there writing a clean up utility for this directory? I'd help fund it as a piece of shareware! I'm seriously considering regressing back to XP.....