since the new PCs are not sold with OS media anymore the only way to do reinstalls are the crappy restore partitions activated by a nonstabdard MBR on the HDD. said MBR makes it impossible to me to make an linux dual boot on the box so i have to live with win7 on it
a lot of the overdesigned stuff can be turned of but the startmenu was just pita - until I found that here:
http://classicshell.sourceforge.net/