>> There is still a lot of work reinstalling apps and restoring data from the external hard drive but it's great being past this first step.
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>Depending on what you're using, most of the decent apps don't need registry at all. From my last six reinstalls, the only lousy players are Office, SQL server and Toad (because it's written in dot net, I guess). The rest of the stuff I use (Libre Office, Gimp, Mozilla's stuff, e editor, LD dictionary and a few more) either finds the registration on disk or doesn't need one. I regularly copy everything (I mean everything, not just what M$ decides we're allowed to see) from my old profile to the new one and then start launching apps.
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>Even Fox doesn't really need the registry, except for the settings we already know (and I've exported the .reg file for that). It's the stuff it borrowed from the rest of M$ (mostly XML related) that won't run without proper install, which is why I do get it properly reinstalled, as this is an important part of the GUI.
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>The reinstall woes are among the main reasons why I don't bother installing Office anymore.

Office 2007 reinstalled without a hitch. At this point everything has been recovered from the backup drive to the newly formatted C:\ drive. The one holdout is Mozilla Thunderbird. It stores data in two files per email folder. I can see that they correspond to the email folders I had before but are stored in an inscrutable format I haven't been able to crack yet. I tend to retain only emails that are worth saving so would really like to get them back.