I have done many clean installs. I will see what kind of restore DVDs and recovery partition this laptop has tomorrow when I get it.
I would love to clean it up enuff without resorting to clean install.
While you might want to just clean up stuff, I'd strongly advise against it with a PC that's not in your control. There is almost no way to to be sure you've gotten everything malware that might be loaded on it off. That's especially true on a Windows PC.