It will be curious how this is resolved. My PC--which was new in December
2006--and was advertised as "Vista Ready" and qualified me for a "free"
Express Vista Upgrade--which was anything but "Express"--apparently requires
a lot more uninstalling of applications than readily opening admitted.
Three, maybe four, paths are possibilities:
-- partition the hard drive to be dual boot, retaining the XP installation
while adding a new "fresh" Vista installation to the new partition. However,
this makes inefficient use of hard drive capacities due to the
redundancies--that is, really nasty overhead. Advantage: all of my current
accessories should still work with XP. Vista plays "second fiddle", as if to
be a crippled OS, since it appears that driver support (despite having some
31,000 drivers available for Vista) appears to be lagging for key drivers,
such as common, popular graphics cards.
-- retain the original partitioning from HP, restoring XP from scratch,
installating nothing but XP updates, and then installing Vista as upgrade.
(on the thought that something that's been installed is interfering in the
oobe directory)
-- wipe out everything on the whole hard drive, and do a "clean" Vista
installation--which I don't know will work, but others have indicated it has.
Virtualized Linux sessions are looking more and more attractive...