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Originally Posted by Leternel
I strongly discourage upgrading to Vista, because it is too restrictive, and considers you as a "slave".
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What? Misinformation about media DRM, which is present in XP and Mac OS X too? Other than that, I can't imagine what you could be talking about. Its version of activation is effectively identical to XP circa SP2/3 with WGA, no bid deal. But even such an easily cracked feature can't justify the hyperbole of considering the user a slave..
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It also has many options you can't change without "cheating".
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Do go on...
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Originally Posted by President_Elect_Shang
In fact I am still considering ways to remove Vista and install XP. My concern is that I will screw up the currently installed programs or that the registry for Vista won't completely be removed and the XP install will be rejected.
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The only way to remove an OS is to format the partition on which it resides. You certainly cannot do an in-place downgrade install to XP, the inverse of an in-place upgrade from, say, XP to Vista. The registry cannot be reused, and installed programs that depend on it will not be salvageable. Well-engineered programs can be copied to a temp drive/partition during the process and copied back, but many apps will not survive. You'll also need to do some juggling of the user folders, since MS changed them to make a lot more sense in Vista (no more of the hideous "My Documents" malarky). Your only option here is a fresh install of XP, either on a new partition/drive (creating a multi-boot system), or after formatting the partition on which Vista is installed.
Really though, unless you've got a ton of old games you need to play, or irreplaceable old hardware the vendors refuse to support with Vista drivers, there really isn't much point in going through the hassle of a downgrade. You're still going to have all of the same old Microsoft problems whether you go with XP or Vista. A dual-boot setup is much easier and safer.