Those computers you're talking about are known as Vampire boxes, made to suck the unsuspecting user dry of both money and patience. Some of the most well known large chain stores have sold these over the years. You can play with them for hours only to find a service loading to put everything you've worked to remove back. Sad, sad state of affairs. BUT, if you have a restore disk chances are that it is a clean restore disk. The logic being that if you have used it long enough to need to restore then you're pretty well tapped out. 5 tips seem to be about 77 tips too short, just restore and be done with it.