I decided to give NOD32 another go (it hates me, it absolutely hates me and has cursed me as you will see) and so used software base administrator to make sure Norton is never installed, rebooted, went to restore and recovery via F11 key then chose a restore to factory setting. Well after choosing what I wanted and didn't want it failed the restore, but not before corrupting the hard drive (because the first process it does is "prepare the hard drive" then it figures out there is no rescue partition I guess).

Point is, I realize now that the rescue and recovery disks I had used in the past must not have replaced the rescue partition on the hard drive, so Base software administrator is useless in this case. Further more it would not allow me to get my old backup as the drive was now corrupt. I had to spend 4 hours using the disks to recover and THEN could get my backup, so here I am again, with Symantec which maybe, is not all that bad as I have the ram to spare. (Side note, if I try to manually remove it using all the ways humanly known and then some NOD32 STILL will crash, that's what happened in the first place a month ago so I need Norton never installed in the first place. The second time it failed was because it didn't work well with thinkvantage private disk setting up a secure partition, maybe I needed to install NOD32 after the partition and computer had been set up but too late now).

If anyone know how to get base software administrator to work using the recovery disks I'm all ears. Also I currently use Windows XP Pro so i don't know if the upgrade anytime to Vista and then doing a clean install is really of interest to me.

Any ideas?