LOST SPACE ON HARD DISK

 

I just purchased Roxio Easy Media Creator 7.5. Roxio 5.0 came with my system from Dell. I downloaded this upgrade from Roxio. It was a 940 MB file. At the time I was utilizing about 51% of my nearly 60 GB Hard disk. Once downloaded, the program ran and I lost nearly 2 GB of space. I could not get the Program to run properly so I did not want to delete the downloaded installation file. However, after lots of frustration I finally I did delete it and I deleted the program ss well by using Add/Remove for the program and just Delete for the installation file.

 

In addition, I deleted a number of other programs (Using Add/Remove utility in Windows), that I have not used in a long time as well. So I thought I would have freed up a lot of space. I deleted these programs with the Add/Remove utility in Win XP Pro.

 

Then I used regedit to remove whatever remnents of these programs that remained. I used Disk Cleanup, deleted the temp files and temporary internet files. Then I defragged my computer. I thought I would be back to about 50% usage of the hard disk or even less since I deleted other programs as well. But low and behold Diskeeper and the System tools both confirm that I have not regained any space. Now I only have 34% available! Where is the other 15%??? How can I recapture it???? My system is still very slow and sluggish. I went into msconfig and took out all the programs that would run on startup, but still no cigar.

 

I run Spybot, Ad-aware, Pest Petrol, IHAte Popups, IHate Spam, SpyBlaster and McAfee Virus scan. I also work behind a hardware firewall and use MS Firewall.

 

I also downloaded teh 90/90 utility from Dell and it gave my hard drive a clean bill of health.

 

Can someone HELP me to recapture the lost space. I would like to reload Roxio, but I am afraid my system will become unmanageably slow.