>>>Do you think Win ME should be an upgrade or a complete wipe and install?
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>>I think ANY OS change should be a complete wipe and install. One of the best short, medium, and long-term time investments you can make.
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>>Some companies wipe all drives every 6 months to a year and reinstall everything, as part of their planned maintenance.
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>They'd love you around here. Everytime they "update" our image (new version or SP), they re-image all our drives. Your old profile is lost along with all individual settings. Since they use the theory of lowest common denominator, we all end up with the settings in place for Smoe, the 80-yo who has never touched a computer. After about six months you end up back where you started, just in time to get the email that says "We'll be re-imaging your hard drives effective..."
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Can you say "Back up early and often?" < g,d&r > Seriously, there are image difference tools available, which can be used to track changes relative to a base image install, and Adaptec has a system tool that behaves in a similar fashion to ME's new System Restore utility. There are other third-party alternatives built around various installation assist programs like CleanSweep.

>I do agree that for developers who do a lot of installs, changes, etc. that this might be a benefit. I usually end up reformatting my dev boxes at least twice a year (more in VFP beta years - sometimes even when I didn't plan on it *g*). For the basic user though, it's over kill and inappropriate.
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As I've said, I keep base system images around to use for testing my installs - I can take a box and install one of several pre-built system images and use that to set up for testing purposes in very short order, blow the machine to hell and gone, and come right back to a working condition for the next test by simply dropping on a fresh image. If I image off the working environment before blowing a test environment on the box, I can use one of my normal development boxes for testing purposes without a great deal of concern about being able to get back to how it was before I needed to draft the system as a test candidate. If you use DAT and have Adaptec's EZ-SCSI, you can blow images to tape - a very cheap, very fast alternative that can hold a whole lot of data on a single removable cartridge. I've not tested using Travan, but the various Travan tape drives should be usable, too, at least the SCSI-based ones, using Adaptec's Image Backup.