I’m just now on the tail end of dealing with accumulated bitrot in my Windows Vista tablet PC that is my primary computing environment. Most of it has gone smoothly, although the process can be tedious. Why you should need to reinstall the OS at periodic intervals remains a mystery to me.
Most of my backups and restores have worked smoothly. Of course, Microsoft is smarter than I am, so backing up and restoring Outlook files is not so simple. The upshot is that the best backup of my email is about a month old and I have lost emails that I’ve received since the end of February. If you’ve sent me something and haven’t heard from me, feel free to ping me again.