So I was in the middle of editing a bunch of photos when one of my hard drives started going out and I bought a new drive and installed a fresh copy of Windows 7.

Now that I'm running on a clean install, my colors and brightness levels are all messed up and I can't continue editing the photos.

I wasn't using any custom color management settings for my monitor beforehand. Nothing set in photoshop. Everything was still at the defaults before the format, and now it's all wonky after.

Windows 7 before, Windows 7 after. Same thing, and I'm not sure why it's different.

Things look odd now not just in Lightroom, but also in browsers and the windows photo viewer. So it's a system-wide thing.

I've tried deleting the color profile that Windows created and still no luck.

Any ideas on why things would get all out of whack on a fresh install?

Monitor drivers (that come with W7) need updating? (Bit of a SWAG)

Thought about that. Windows 7 did update the monitor when it did its series of Windows Updates.

That's the only thing that's touched the monitor drivers so it should be the same now as it was before the format.

Ariel - Whether you knew it or not, Photoshop was using a default monitor profile, which probably had very little to do with your actual calibration. It might be time now to get on board with real hardware screen calibration and know for sure that you're starting on the right foot. You can't do any better than the X-Rite Display Pro and for a little over $200, just might be the best digital imaging money you've ever spent.

You know, that's probably the best route to go. Hopefully it's nicer than the Spyder I used a few years back.

Is there a review or thread about it that you particularly like?

Here's one review...
http://www.northlight-images.co.uk/reviews/profiling/i1_display_pro.html

And here's another with more comparisons between other models and other examples of the same models...
http://www.drycreekphoto.com/Learn/Calibration/MonitorCalibrationHardware.html

- Alan