>>Vlad,
>>First, I did just that, reinstalled just the OS in the same directory. It got even uglier. The CD-ROM drive now wasn't accessible, network access was gone, and got INETSW95 illegal DLL call or something similar even before the desktop screen ever comes up! Finally, I just decided to reinstall the OS in another directory which, like the installation said, deleted most of my apps automatically while installing in another directory. Now I have a beautiful Windows 95 desktop with nothing on it! Ah well, time to start reinstalling all the apps (I don't even know all the stuff the original setup had!!!!!). It's going to be a long Monday when I get back to the office.
>>
>>Thanks anyway.
>>John.
>>
>
>[Snip snip, a little cutting]
>
>Hi,
>I was also thinking of doing that (reinstall Win95) since my win95 directory structure (includig subdirectories) has grown to over 200M, where I have fixed/worked on other people's computer and their Win95 directory is barely 50M
>
>But I also have many other applications, utilities, Libraries (DLLs), ActiveX controls (OCX) files and many many registry settings. So what I was thinking of doing (has yet to be done due to lack of time) was to rename the windows directory, then reinstall Win95 In the "right" directory. Once the basic install has been completed, I would copy over the registry files from the original Win95, edit the Start menu to keep only the apps I want, then test the all one at a time. I know this sounds time consuming, but that's all I found so far.
>
>I have tried CleanSweep and it deleted (luckily I told it to move them only) pretty much every DLL I had, saying that it was obsolete. I knew this was to good to be true, but wanting to give the product its fair chance, I figured I'll let it ride. Well, turns out I had to copy every DLL I had moved (save maybe 1 or 2) back to the system directory.
>
>Anyways, just my thought of how I'd go about re-installing Win95 (this is because I have the OEM OSR-2 CD, not the upgrade).
>
>Any thoughts?
>
>Hugo Dahl
>hdahl@rocler.qc.ca

This will not do any good. Probably you'll just have a lot of problems for missing files/settings.

Basically, there are 2 ways:
1. Delete all and reinstall everything from scratch (Windows and all applications). This is good when your system works, but it became too "fat" (usually because of installing of all kind of programs, ocxs, etc.)

2. Reinstall the OS as an upgrade (it doesn't matter if you have the full or the upgrade CD, both of them know how to do an upgrade). This will overwrite the OS files and it's recommended when you have corupted files (or you suspect that some files are corrupted.) It shouldn't change your settings and it surely will not erase unnecessary files.

If you reinstall the system and copy the old registries (as you say you want to do), you'll have many problems because many files will not be found.

Vlad