Troublesome Format

Ok so sometime ago I had to contact SONY cust. support because my DVD drive was not functioning properly. It was a hardware issue but they insisted it was not and messed with a bunch of areas of the comp including the registry. Following that they eventually sent me a new drive which after installed would not perform fully. So now there was a non hardware issue. After restoring what I had noticed being altered in the reg. The DVD functioned properly.
Later I started noticing other things not functioning properly. For example the system restore would not restore fully any more and my camera was no longer recognized as being attached.
I contacted them again and they told me to format the comp. When I tried that I kept getting errors. I eventually got the format and restore to factory settings to go. However it was not smooth, I got a few pop up messages during the process. As far as I can remember I think they were referring to 3 different programs. At the time I assumed it had something to do with limited time usage agreements, they were all programs that I had long since removed prior to the format.
Ok so now the laptop is (supposedly) back to its factory defaults, however its very sluggish and then some. When browsing over the internet every so often it hangs up and it only starts functioning again after a restart. Overall programs are not running smoothly. And when I shutdown or try to restart it takes forever and a day just to logout and shutdown. I have removed or stopped from running most of the superfluous programs. The start up has been cleaned out. And all updates have been performed through the Sony website and Microsoft.
I also have since been in the system restore options and that area is functioning better now.

So I am not really sure as to what step I should take next.
Help would be much appreciated.
Thanks

 

To add some clarification I am using the Vista installation/recovery program provided by Sony which is on a Hard Disk partition of my laptop. I am not formatting and installing through a bootable cd, I am using the recovery program provided by sony with my laptop.

Does anyone think the Sony recovery program erases and re-writes the entire registry, or does it simply save the registry and put the same old faulty registry values back after the repair procedure?

 

I would think the recovery should completely erase the drive and install fresh. No remnants of any programs that you had added to the PC.

How long ago did you reformat? I'm guessing you had backed up any personal documents and files and that after the install they were not on your PC. [I just want to make sure that we are talking about truly going back to factory defaults].

That being said it should have gone pretty much flawlessly. If I had errors while doing a complete recovery I would do it again.

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Edit: I just reread your post. What is the model of your laptop? I want to check the manual to see if we are talking about the same type of recovery program or something more selective.