Re-installing FF

hi folks and merry christmas!

i've been gone for a bit. Windows has been giving me fits and i've had to reinstall it twice now. so, i havent been around much and i've also, obviously, lost my registry entries to FF.

what i'd like to know is, i've got my old folder of FF, minus the stuff that was in the documents and settings folders, including "Filter Forge 1.006 setup.exe. can i just run that and it will install ok and then just download all the library filters again, or do i need to actually download the setup stuff again?

also, is there any way to optionally put the stuff that normally goes in documents and settings somewhere else? i've got VERY limited space on my c: drive and would like to keep as much as possible off of there.

i may have even saved off the filters from the library. i was able to save some stuff stuff off of my old system drive. i'll have to look and i know i can just move the ffxml files ok. so, that part is not a problem if i still have them. it's just i'd like to be able to place them somewhere else than the c: drive.

oh, and i do have the license key for the end of february already. got that and saved that off before all the hassles. so, that shldnt be a problem either.

That won't help for Filter Forge data though, since we're not storing the data in My Documents folder.
You can move your entire profile though. If you're using Windows XP, just type the "lusrmgr.msc" in the Start->Run prompt, and check your user properties in the "Users" folder. I'd recommend reading the associated Windows XP help section for best practices related to moving profiles.

windows couldnt find any file or executable named "lusrmgr.msc".

i did get FF installed again with 1.006. apparently, i managed to save that and running it again worked just fine. i've also downloaded the entire library again....sheesh, dat's a lot of filters!

unfortunately, i've lost some of my filters. i had a whole series of crashes a while back due to a harddrive going bad and yes, it was the c: drive. i managed to recover some things and i had other things backed up, but apparently scandisk couldnt find everything nor could my other recovery attempts. and my c: drive backup was a bit dated. and, just to complicate things, after the c: drive died, another drive started going bad AFTER the reinstall of windows. and that had to be installed over the top of windows and then that crashed so hard it couldnt be retrieved. so, i'm now on a new drive with a new install and things seem fairly stable now. so, there was almost no time during all that to make another backup and i was so sick of reinstalling and trying to repair windows that i never backed up during all that mess.

so, during the last 3 months or so, i've gone from my old 1.7 ghz machine, in which the motherboard burned out, to a brand new custom machine, in which two drives burned out, and about 3 or 4 installs of windows. lol. not a lot of fun.

but, i did recover some of my old filters, so all wasnt lost. i even managed to save my old emails which had the license key bella had sent and didnt have to re-ask for that.

and the reason i have limited space on this drive is that i had set up the main partition on this drive a while back with only 10 gigs. it wasnt the system drive back then. during all this mess it became the system drive and is the only drive i currently have installed. so, 10 gigs on c:. that's somewhat small and probably wouldnt even work for Vista, from what i've heard about it. lol.

thanks guys

well, i'm now up to about my fifth re-install of windows on this new machine, all within about 3 weeks of each other. i've had two drives go bad and some problems with drivers. any and every crash with any and all software would wipe out windows, including any crashes from FF. and i mean wipe it out. the machine would not load windows on a reboot. in one instance it took out the hardware abstraction layer and its .dll. in another i tried to overwrite windows with windows and that created some odd things and eventually crashed and took out windows again. in yet another, i went into the repair console and windows didnt even exist and it took me to c: rather than c:\windows like it normally does. it's been just one pain after another.

hopefully, i've got the main issues handled. crashes of programs now seem to work correctly rather than wiping out windows. i've got FF re-installed now and am pushing the limits to try to make things crash to find out if i'm going to have to re-install windows yet again. windows is now back on a re-formatted c: drive (it was on K: at one point) and due to drive failures the c: drive is now my main free space partition. so FF is there and i wont be re-arranging things.

so, for the time being, i wont need to move anything around....unless windows crashes yet again. lol. i havent even activated windows yet in anticipation of another weird and horrible crash.