Ray,
I love your programs. I use A1, Regvac, Winrescue, and rescue disk.

I have a question. (Winxp pro)
If you right click My computer icon, Select Properties and Hardware and then Device mgr. and then go to view and select show all.

the list of drivers shows some that are grayed out. It appears that these are old no longer used drivers or trash.

Will one of your programs( or perhaps should one of them) select these grayed out drivers and after careful review
and possibly removal of known good links. allow them to be deleted.

it seems to my uneducated view that this would further improve my computer?

   I do not see a Show All item on the View menu.  There is a "show hidden devices".
   There are no grayed out items in my Device Manager.  I do not remember there ever being any or ever hearing about there being any.
   The bad items in the Device Manager are shown with an exclamation mark in a yellow circle or a red cirlce.  Some items listed as Unknown device are also bad.  Many of the bad items are in the Other devices section.
   Old drivers should be updated with current drivers.  Removing an item from the Device Manager will just cause Windows to put it back and then it probably will not find the correct driver and it will end up with an unknown device in place of the removed item.  The device may also stop working if you try to remove its item.
   None of our programs will correct the Device Manager.
   There is a driver updater called DriverAgent (http://driveragent.com/?ref=239) which will update the drivers, but it does not always work correctly.
   My recommendation would be to leave the Device Manager alone unless something on it is giving you problems.

Ray,
thanks for the quick response. I have quite a few grayed out entries.
the majority of them I know are from items no longer on my system.

I will probably remove just those that I have no doubt about.

I use the driver program you suggested. It makes no attempt to update the grayed items.
also I have two programs that backup all drivers on my system. by using a combined list I believe I have suffient backup for recovery should I go too far, I also have total backups to rely on.

proceeding with caution.