How can I refresh Etch completely?

["Dennis G. Wicks" <wix@eskimo.com>]

Greetings;

I think I have something basically wrong with my system.

Programs that nobody else has problems with fail with
a floating point exception.

Web pages that work fine for everybody else don't work on
my system and throw a bunch of javascript and java errors.

I upgraded from Sarge according to the instructions but I have
had all sorts of problems with it.

I have reinstalled the kernel. Reformatted the swap file.
Reinstalled a couple of the problem programs after doing
an apt-get clean so a new deb file would be downloaded.
No help.

It seems to me that either something got corrupted during
the upgrade, there is something left over from Sarge that
shouldn't be, or there is the wrong version of a library
somewhere.

Is this a clue? When I try to use aptitude it wants to remove
150+ "unused" packages, including Gnome. Doesn't feel right
to me so I don't use it.

Any way, any ideas short of the old Windows stand by,
"Format the hard drive and reinstall"?

Many TIA,
Dennis