> You bought and paid for a laptop with XP Pro, all that 'vaporware' which 
> came pre-installed on it is what paid Toshiba to sell you the laptop with 
> XP Pro.  The 'Recovery CD' will either return your laptop to the 
> 'Out-of-box' state, or allow you to re-install chosen vaporware.

Of course, I was unable to read the terms and conditions before ordering so 
haven't a clue what the legal point of view is concerning re-installation of 
the software. If this is Toshiba's stance, i.e. no way of getting plain 
vanilla Win XP Pro back on there, then they've probably lost further sales. 
The Dell CD puts Win XP Pro back on there, usually with most of the drivers 
but not 3rd party software.

> Of course purchasing your own copy of XP Pro will set you back $100 - 
> $150, but it will give you a cleaner machine.  My plan of action has 
> always been

That's a possibility but leaves a nasty taste in the mouth.

> to remove all the garbage they put on there, leaving me with a tattered, 
> but usable cleaner OS.  I dump it all.  Make a big pot of coffee, because 
> you'll be at if for hours and will soon tire of restarting your 'New' 
> computer.  I use Symantec's Norton WinDoctor to clean up the mess all this 
> crap makes. WinDoctor ain't free, you can run CCleaner (Crap Cleaner) to 
> do housekeeping from what AOL, Quicken, yadda, yaddah, yadda leaves 
> behind.

Startup Inspector will be a great way for getting rid of anything that tries 
to load during startup. I've just taken an image of the laptop using Acronis 
True Image so I can have a play.

> Toshiba, Dell, HP, Compaq, etc should be shot for turning out these 
> machines burdened with all this avoirdupois.  I remember the old days when 
> I bought a computer and it came with a box of instructions, diskettes 
> containing the OS and virgin harddrive, oh how I long for it once again.

I can't believe that this is how large corporations use Toshiba - in fact, I 
know so - they must have access to an OEM installation CD for Win XP. It's 
possible I guess they've got a global Win XP license.

Cheers, Rob.