...on more than one occasion I've taken the hard drive to another PC and renamed the WINNT, Documents and Settings, and Program Files folders, and then taken the hard drive back to its original PC for reinstallation. If it's FAT or FAT32 you just need a DOS boot disk to do this, but if it's NTFS you need another OS capable of manipulating NTFS.

You can also do a clean installation and specify a different folder than WINNT. I just find keeping the defaults helps other techs that might need to look at the thing after.

If not already done, convert the hard drive to NTFS BEFORE reinstalling, or during the reinstall. This way Win2K will apply the default and secure-enough permissions to WINNT, Documents and Settings and Program Files so you can create restricted accounts for daily use. And don't use Administrator or Power User accounts for daily work again.

There are ways to set up the default permissions after the fact, but on Win2K at least it can mess up the permissions on some user profiles. They fixed that on XP SP2 -- after a convert to NTFS it resets the permissions based on the defaults and on which user belongs to which profile.

And of course I'm going to plug my own URL.