My answer would be to

1/ take an image of your current installation, using Ghost or DriveImage XML (free, works well for me) or maybe the stuff you mentioned will do it.

2/ test the image!! by restoring it to an empty partition on your existing disk.

3/ Now you are sure the image is OK, format the partition windows was on, then restore it from the image you took in step 1

There's a bit more to doing this properly than I can mention here, might be worth reading through some online guides on how to backup / restore drive partitions via an image.

In fact it's a good idea to take regular images of your hard drive as backups, it's nice to go back to an ultra-clean install of windows and all your programs in one fell swoop.

I'm sure there was a post here a while back about this, splitting your disk up into partitions and backing them up. In a nutshell:

- Partition 1: Windows and music software
- Partition 2: Samples
- Partition 3: Other data

Then the idea is that you install everything on partition 1, image it, and restore to the clean image if/when the installation starts running like a dog. Also, you never need to reinstall the individual programs or enter licence keys again :)

*** Careful with restoring to disk images though, as you can seriously lose data! ***