Little hard to do after turning off System Restore and Hibernation and deleting all restore points and Hibernation resources as I previously mentioned doing...
At this time there are NO restore points to go back to, and am still missing 30GB of HDD free space. The only option I have other than a complete reformat is to restore back a System Image made just after acquiring the laptop... which is almost as bad.. Will mean re-installing and updating dozens of programs.. copying all documents, images, videos and .pst files to another drive, copying browser settings, bookmarks (approx 40-50GB of data), before attempting image restore, then reloading programs and copying everything back the way it was...
In other words, not a quick or an easy task. and only possible on one of the laptops... the other one runs Vista Home Premium (so only file backup, not disc image) and was pre-Service Pack 1 when purchased.. So that means reverting back to original factory image.. re-installing all Windows updates thru Service Pack 1, re-installing all programs, data, etc (more than 1.5 years worth of info)...