Okay, so I did all that stuff, and removed all of the "unused" devices. I rebooted. Windows started up fine, got past the welcome screen, and started loading all of the startup apps. Then programs started hanging. Nothing would run for longer than 5 seconds before it hung. The OS itself seemed fine, but every program was stuck. Task manager wouldn't come up, and closing programs just brought up the "x program has stopped responding, hit end to end task now, or cancel to go back to windows etc..." but no matter what I did, the program wouldn't die. I could load up more instances fine, and they would run for 5 seconds before hanging. It happened with EVERYTHING. Firefox, thunderbird, IE, trillian...
I couldn't even get to system restore. I just finished with a boot from the XP cd and a "repair current XP installation"
It's all good now, but I'm not doing that again.