I have purchased an HP Pavilion a200n Desktop in 2003 and am wanting to format the hardrive, but I now realized that I do not have an operating system CD. The HP website suggests creating a recovery CD. However, won't that just restore the system back to the state it was in when the recovery CD was created? I have found several trojans and viruses on my computer that I cannot remove. It seems best just to format the computer. Does anyone have any suggestions?

Your best bet would be to call HP's tech support line and ask them to send you a new CD for your model computer.

This might be just the thing

http://www.g4tv.com/screensavers/features/326/Bootable_Windows_CD.html