BIG BAD WOLF: thank you very much for the link and information! I'll download it and check out what is going with the PC. I'll do it within tonight and tomorrow: there is another debugging to be done here at home that has at the moment higher priority (laundry )

Is there a way to say what programs still have left stuff in the registry that may be slowing the pc down (other than spyware)? The reason is that I feel that I haven't installed too many new things on my PC and it did run smoothly for most of the time before recently (maybe a month or two ago).