Old User Accounts

[studloans]

Ok. This is my first day on this forum. My father in law mentioned this to me.
A few weeks ago, I did a full reinstall of windows (XP home) and everything went fairly smooth.
I wanted to remove all things from my PC and start over. This is my work old work PC. I removed everything from my old PC to my new one. The old PC was getting a bit sluggish. Its harddrive was 18 gigs and I had nearly 15 gigs of crud on the drive.
After reinstalling windows I realized that many of the programs that I had on the pc prior to the reinstall were still there (C Drive, Program Files), but I could not access them because they were loaded under a previous user account. Where did I go wrong.
If I look in the C: Drive, Documents and Settings, there are 5 users accounts located there (all users, Chris - Old, All Users.Windows, Default user, and owner.chris-XXXXXXX). Why are all of these here? Is it safe to remove all of these.
Ideally, I would like to remove all the previous programs and old user accounts from the PC.
Are there programs that will go out there that will remove these programs? if so, please provide me the name of the program.

[Erik]

When you start the intall you need to boot from the Windows XP cd. It will give you the choice of formatting and warn about losing all of your data. That is the choice you want to use. You probably chose to do a repair install or a nondestructive install.

[Budfred]

Welcome to http://www.pcguide.com/ubb/pcgubb.gif

If you don't wipe the drive prior to a reinstall, you just end up with another install of WinXP or "repairing" the copy you have... You either need to wipe the drive and install from scratch after backing up what you want to keep or you need to go in and start deleting folders manually... If you really don't want to keep most of it, I suggest the first option...

You can use this tool to wipe the drive (if I remember correctly):

http://www.killdisk.com/downloadfree.htm

This one will delete selected folders and may also be able to wipe the drive:

http://www.tolvanen.com/eraser/