I have a PC problem …

My first post and I am doing it without my PC, why? Because my Vista is down again.
One of my Vista’s 500,000 objects has probably been overrun by another object causing my entire machine to hang and run slowly. Don’t get me wrong, I think that Microsoft are doing an amazing job building the most common and scalable platform that anyone ever made – but, with so many moving parts, statistically, something will not work right.
So, what can I do now, having no PC to work with?
I tried to update my Vista to service pack 1, had a whole problem with that too, after 2 days of “fun” I found that I had to remove some files, reinstall some KB and pray. Nothing helped.I can spend hours, or days, understanding what is wrong with it. Frankly, I have better things to do. Alternatively, I can reinstall my PC – because when my Vista was new it worked (quite) well… Right now my backup is at about 39% …
Reinstalling is actually a pretty bad option, which is frustrating. I need to backup my documents, licenses, software, reinstall all over again, find the drivers, re-enter the licenses and hope that I am not going to forget anything.
I would gladly use our own product Reimage but we are not supporting Vista, my R&D team is promising me a working product by mid 2009 …
Googeling “Vista Repair”
Being at this “frustrating” situation I was even ready to pay for a simple promise, so I googled “VISTA repair”. I did not expect anything but a scam. There are so many products promising me that they can miraculously fix my PC.
All of those registry cleaners, registry scanners, registry thingies, registry sliders, registry fixers & mixers, registry and registry optimizers. Why the Registry ? it is just one big sitting database of Windows. It just became such a buzz word.  If it was fixing star-trek ships, it would be “Re-modulating the buffers”. The registry is a database, called Configuration Manager inside the windows kernel – nothing really to optimize there, it is working very well from the days of NT 3.51 (15 years ago),  these folks would go through this big database and look for something that looks like a file name, these programs will check if this file name exists on the disk. If not, they will delete it from the records. By definition, Windows automatically ignores these keys. In essence, these registry cleaners do nothing.
The registry industry marketing is amazing– “I had 2498723762348 errors and my [insert the product name here] fixed it for me”. Random name, random state. My mother would buy that! Furthermore, when they scan the system they would associate the location of a key to a group and write: you have 74 errors in your fonts!
Windows has about 100 different sub systems, .NET components, network subsystem, video, drivers, synchronization, security, internal / external application communication mechanisms, etc. PC repair is not that simple …