I’ve done dozens of windows reinstalls with losing any data. why would you lose data? there’s no need to reformat. The installer deletes all the system files and the registry and reinstalls from scratch. The installs as clean as if you had reformatted, but it doesn’t delete stuff outside the Windows folder.
Your program installations are gone, but Office reinstalls in about ten minutes. Worst case, you have to copy the documents from the obsolete user folder to the new my documents folder. Five minutes.
Best case scenario, which I’ve used in all but three or four cases, you do a Repair reinstall. This works fine if a virus hasn’t hopelessly corrupted your registry. This takes about 20 minutes on a recent vintage machine. When it’s done you’re ready to go.
If Windows updates get uninstalled, the files are still downloaded. Windows update will find the downloads and install them.
Mostly I am working on Windows XP Home systems and 9 times out of 10 reinstalling Windows will wipe the previous installation and with it all the personal data (referred to as a “Clean Install” as opposed to an “Install in Place”).
In the last two weeks I have done this three times. There was minimal data loss in each case as I was able to slave and retrieve their my docs/photos/psts. In the same period I have cleaned 5 systems of major virus/malware problems with no data loss.
If I could simply reinstall Windows with no data loss, I wouldn’t ever use Spybot S&D, Ad-Aware, Stinger, or have learned how to strip viruses out of the registry by hand.
I would just reinstall Windows everytime a hiccup happened.
But I don’t live in that reality.