Legit Reviews

So a friend of mine has a corrupt vista installation and he wants me to reinstall vista without losing any of his data. he only has 1 hard drive of 500gb which is almost full and really doesn't want to lose any of that data. how can this be done?

Depending on how corrupt it is, you have several options.

In order of least system damaging
Try the Vista Roll-Back feature, if it's been configured
Use the Vista install disc and try to repair the installation
Reinstall Vista over the current install, data will remain; will have to reinstall software; potential for corruption still be there
Microsoft User State Migration Tool; back-up all the data and the configuration settings to be reloaded after the reinstall
Manually back-up the data to an external drive(s); assuming you have one; potential for data to be missed; total reimage

ok so it puts everything into windows.old on clean install which is what i hoped would happen but any .exe applications need to be re-installed again

Correct, it sucks but at least data files remain intact...