Today I reinstalled Windows, Catherine is staying over her sisters again so she wouldn't have to put up with the side-effects of such a huge job. Hadn't been done for about 2 years and with all the beta leftovers on the drive it needed doing, just about reinstalled all the main applications I use. This is where I should probably image the hard drive - something I always mean to do but never get around to doing.
One thing really annoyed me when reinstalling today and something I don't want to spend another 30 minutes at some point in the future trying to work out, so I'll post it here so I can easily find it later, that damn stupid ATI bloat control panel that places a link to it on every menu on the system. No thanks.
I sometimes wonder why Microsoft allow (well they were probably forced by some anti-competitive nonsense) shell extensions they're usually only ever abused, Winzip's is the only one I ever use and ever allow on my systems.
Here's how to remove it.
HKCR\Directory\Background\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers
Delete {5E2121EE-0300-11D4-8D3B-444553540000}, if ACE exists with {5E2121EE-0300-11D4-8D3B-444553540000} delete that entry too.
Also in the process I decided to split my RAID-0 array. Has helped a big issue I've had for a while, break up of my Freeview card during heavy disk access has completely resolved like I expected.
One thing I would quite like to do however is get the Vista boot loader working across all the drives, so I need to play around with that - it's still all handled in a command line at the moment so it needs a bit of time, I'd rather not bugger everything up and have to go hunting for a floppy drive that works again - damn SATA drivers, and nLite doesn't work with Vista or Media Center Edition. Grrr.
I plan on going over to Vista for most of my work very soon - I nearly did it with the current build (in fact I did for a few days) but audio performance is still a bit ropey and Outlook 2003 would receive any mail (weird), so I'm holding off until the next drop in a couple of weeks time.
Anyway - may be it's time to install some games. 