Welcome back, laptop!

My laptop keyboard has had bad keys (i.e. Left-Ctrl, Fn, Z, Left-Alt). I called the product support of Toshiba but I was told that could be a driver conflict issue. However I knew too well that it was nothing like that. But I had still been living with this defect for over a year, as the extended warranty I got on it would last till 2006. Then recently a harddisk corruption happened on the cluster that was used for the ntuser file of my user profile. I could still log on as myself but the system couldn't load the associated user profile. I called the product support number again and again I was questioned about my own observation. I waited for another month and finally shipped the laptop back to the manufacturer, as they agreed to pay for the shipping both ways. Before I did that last week, I set up a PII 550MHz machine so that I could at least connect back to work. Surprisingly, I found the shipping box sitting in front of my door tonight. I didn't expect it would be this quick. Skeptically, I looked around the box for signs of a bounced shipment to no avail. And I found a new shipping label on it addressing to me. So I eagerly cut opened the box and found my good old friend inside. On the work order sheet, it said that both the keyboard and the harddrive were replaced. As one would expect from a new harddrive, it was re-imaged. The laptop looked almost as clean as new. I will no longer use it to do overnight downloads (I used to be a big BT fan). Instead I will start bringing it back to work as there are quite a few meetings to attend these days. After I booted up the system, I found America Online 8.0 installed on it. I went to the Add/Remove Programs applet to try to get rid of it. Funny enough, the AOL de-installation program said that was launched said the program wasn't installed! Then how did such entry show up in ARP? I tried looking up the Internet for a way to cleanly de-install the software but in vain. So I went through the pain to regsvr32 /u all the DLLs under "%ProgramFiles%\Common\AOL*" and "%ProgramFiles%\America Online 8.0". Then I went into regedit.exe and removed most (if not all) of the CLSIDs, IIDs, TypeLibs and AppIDs that had anything to do with "AOL" or "America Online". Only by then I figured there were so many of them. So I went ahead to get rid of them one by one. Also I found that AOL had installed two drivers into the system WANATW (i.e. WAN Miniport (ATW)) and another one that starts with "ATW". It took me hours to carefully dispose the AOL-specific reg entries but not other shared references they referred to. I rebooted the system and saw that it still ran in good shape and no longer showed the AOL drivers. If this turned out to cause other problems, as I don't really have anything important on it, I will certainly rebuild the box. Right now I am installing XPSP2 onto it. It will be a few more hours, if not days, to set it up for all the applications I once had on it.