HP Laptop Non-destructive Recovery?

I am working an HP Pavilion Entertainment PC laptop w/ Windows 7 pre-installed. It is having some lock up issues, somewhat resolved after removing Mcafee Av, but still tends to freeze up at times. The user had several registry cleaners on it and I think between those two it still has some registry issues.

The Recovery partition does not show an option for a non-destructive repair install, like in XP. It has Software Program Reinstallation, Hardware Driver Reinstallation, System Restore, and System Recovery. The System Recovery makes it very clear that it will format the hard drive and all files created by the user will be lost.

Is there any other option to reinstall the OS without losing all his personal files? I would back them up for him, but he has allot of movie files that would take up too much space.

Or.. would creating another partition for all his movie files to be stored on, and then doing a System Recovery on the main partion work?