I've had too many crashes over the years, and I make it a point of reformatting and re-installing my OS and core apps once a year, anyways
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I haven't had a crash in any Windows box I was responsible for in over 6 years (not including the drive failure I had a bit over a year ago). That includes production systems used by our Govt. However, I only use or used Windows NT (3.51 and 4.0) and Windows 2k. I'm also particular about the hardware I use, choosing proven stability over raw performance every time.
Sorry, had to brag.
Gewehr, I manually clean my registries. I'm pretty comfortable mucking about in there though. Mr. Irwin was commenting the other day how fast my 2yo PC opens MS Word compared to his shiny new system.
Chris