FYI. Just tested my Wacom Intuos 4 tablet and my Painter 11 application. Woo-Hoo! All is good!
The laptop has updated Antivirus defs and a few other things since reinstalling so it seems to be working fine now.
Everything looking good here and I'm quite happy with it all .... except I sure wish they had given me a free copy of Office with it.
P.S. I also burned DVDs for each version.