You may remember that Win8 kept mucking up all my partitions as described in this thread. I had originally installed Win8 in my old Vista partition which was a primary active.

I thought it may have had something to do with the Vista legeacy. So I completely cleared that partition, made it inactive, logical and split it into two logical partitions. Then I reinstalled Windows8 into one of those new partitions.

So far so good. As expected it grabbed the first primary partition on that HDD and made that active. It happened to be my old Vista recovery partition. That works and does not bother me. It also does not clobber my other partitions any more (at least up to now) and it works as expected.

There are however some strange things happening. When I was done with the installation and went to the desktop, I got the desktop picture and the background color of the desktop from my first Win8 installation. Also, my IE settings from that time were all still intact. All other settings seem to be gone.Where on earth did that come from. There was absolutely nothing left of the old installation.

This and the fact that my first installation kept clobbering the other partitions really puzzles me.

Isnt there a ".old" file ? I may be totaly misunderstanding but is it possible that its grabbing random junk from there?

No, there is no "old" of any sort. It was a completely new installation to a completely new partition. And the original partition had been erased, reformatted, split.

Well then your right when you say its weird. There should be no reason for it. Stumped