Regarding TEMP, I have suggested uninstalling most software so this shouldn’t be too much of a problem. In this situation, it is better to re-install afterwards if they are needed rather than try and repair them.

I wasn’t too sure about the swap stuff which is why I put it in the addendum, your suggestion is good. However I don’t think the poor performance during the scrubbing should be too much of a problem.

The registry is a blind spot for me but I was hoping that be removing the accounts it would also remove the corresponding HKEY_CURRENT_USER branches. I know from experience that many programs still write to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE but they are getting rarer.

Spyware and viruses - yes, but there was a caveat at the start that it was a reasonably running system before you start

I had forgotten about systems with a Recovery Disk (or partition). This will certainly make the process simpler and I will add an addendum bullet about it but you do need to be careful. Although the early ones re-initialised the whole of the disk, later more friendly versions only re-initialise the software and leave the user data untouched. In neither case do they scrub the free areas so an eraser will still be necessary.

Anyway, thanks for the comments and I am glad (and a little surprised) that you found it so soon.

Good article, but I’m not too sure this approach will clear out all of the old junk; particularly things like the System registry hive will still be bloated with application and service data. Also, the Windows and System32 directories are dumping grounds for all sorts of spyware and viruses, but even relatively technical users would be well-advised to leave these locations alone, which means they’re never going to be cleaned up.

I reckon there are three major ways to get your PC cleaned up:
If you’ve got one, use the Recovery Partition - it will get the PC back to factory defaults in the quickest and easiest fashion.
Use the clean-up method you suggest (and Heidi or similar) if you can’t restore the system with a recovery partition: at least this will remove something like 90% of the junk, but I would say that this relies on the system being in a reasonable state (no viruses, not too many questionable bits of software) to begin with.
The hardest way to rebuild your PC would be the ‘insert Windows CD and boot from it, format hard disk, reinstall all applications,’ etc. etc. [As an aside, do you remember when this was standard advice from Microsoft?] This approach requires that you have all necessary drivers beforehand, application CDs, software keys, and lots and lots of spare time.