IE 6 running slow after uninstall of IE 7

[hearrean]

I am a new member & hopefully I'm posting this in the right place for this topic. I have a (1) year old HP Media Center PC running Windows XP. Back in February, I made a decision to upgrade to IE 7 from IE 6. I decided this past weekend that I wanted to revert back to IE 6. To keep this short, basically I did several things in trying to uninstall 7, tried uninstall from "add/remove" section, used a restore point to restore my system back a few days, etc. etc. After doing so, my system became so buggy I had to get a tech out yesterday to get all my favorites back, completely remove IE 7 & get me back to IE 6. The problem now is that IE 6 is running much slower than it used to taking a long time to pull up sites from my favorites or those that I type into the address bar, etc. Before the tech left, he cleaned out all my cookies, temp files, ran a spyware program, etc. That did speed up the shut down & start-up process of my computer, however I didn't notice the slow explorer problem until after he left. I know enough about computers to be dangerous, but I'm guessing that maybe I have a corrupt registry, windows or something. (BTW, I'm using DSL for my internet).
Does anyone have any suggestions on what I can do? How difficult is it to re-install Windows XP or should I? I have an OEM system so I didn't get any OS CD's with the unit. I understand all that's somewhere partitioned on my system....
Any help would be appreciated..

Ken

[glc]

Here's the HP article on how to reinstall Windows if you feel that may be necessary:

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/genericDocument?cc=us&docname=bph07145&lc=en

There is a utility that you can use to create your own recovery CD's - I highly recommend that you do, if your hard drive were to die you would be up the creek without a paddle without them. Here is the how-to:

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/genericDocument?cc=us&docname=bph07143&lc=en