My policy now when I get asked to "just have a quick look" at a Windows computer is to decline, because I've just wasted far too much time trying to patch things up and remove all the junk. I've usually ended up reformatting the disk and reinstalling from scratch.
I'll go back to those I've dealt with in the past where I know exactly what's been installed, but for anything else it's just become far too much hassle.
One of my programming/maintenance jobs for a lcoal company is on a system which is running DOS 4. That's what I put on the system when it was installed about 4 years ago along with my custom software. It's more than adequate for the task, it doesn't eat up gigabytes of disk space, and above all it's reliable.
