Too bad you've had to go through such an ordeal. 99% of the time the OEM utilities are available for download from the manufacturer's site. As you've found out some of these are invasive; I had a lot of trouble upgrading a high-end Toshiba notebook from WXP Home to WXP Pro until I uninstalled quite a few of the Toshiba utilities. I was able to reinstall from web downloads after the upgrade was complete.
Regards. Al
"Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent." -- Isaac Asimov
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Every app wants to be a database app when it grows up
