bistro ... there is 2 gigs of ram on the laptop and 32 bit Vista Home Premium ... I will get together a list of all the programs that are sitting in this SWSETUP folder ... I discovered last night that the setup for Norton 2008 is still in that folder, even though I ran the Norton Removal Tool ...

this little error thing only started happening and it is intermittent and seems to have something to do with the HP preinstalled stuff ...

I did just a recovery installation last week using the recovery partition ... I also have a set of Recovery DVD's and no doubt all the HP software stuff is on that too ... I'm wondering if I could just delete this SWSETUP folder, along with the Recovery Partition ... I guess the only other way I could do a clean install is to get a copy of Vista Premium and use the key that is on the laptop, and then activate it ...

believe it or not there was a SIMs game that came preinstalled on the stupid thing that was over 2.6 gigs ... and there is a bunch of HP stuff that monitors this and that and I have no idea if its necessary to keep this stuff ....

I will post back today with a list of the programs on the laptop and take the advice on what can be removed .... thanks a million