Saving personal settings

Hi ...

Perhaps I've been looking in all the wrong websites including, so far, sevenforums so perhaps I should have asked my question in the first place to this particular part of sevenforums.

Prior to early January this year, I was running XP professional. Had it for years and I was very comfortable with it. Sure, I had problems with it from time to time but it was a simple and easy application to correct with saving my data so that I could put it all back after I'd done a clean re-install of XP.

Then in January, I grudgingly switched to Windows 7, not because of all the scary talk about XP being unsafe because Microsoft was about to pull the plug but rather because I knew there would come a time when I'd want or need a particular programme only to find that it didn't support XP.
So now I have W7 which I find is very stable ... more so than XP ... but over the last few months, I've done a lots of tweaks to it etc. so that now, it looks very close to that of XP.

What I want to know is this ...

Is there a programme I can use or a file I can create, preferably the former, that will save all the settings i've changed, mainly in Control Panel, so that if it ever turns out that I have to run a clean W7 install in the future, I will have means to put all my settings back into the application after it's been re-installed.
This will save me a great deal of time by not having to plow my way through the tons of links in Control Panel.
My C:\ drive only contains Windows 7.
All my programmes and their related settings as well as all home-generated files & folders are on another hard drive.

Any help will be very much appreciated.
Thanks ... Michael.

thank you for your suggestions ...

macrium looks good but i think it's more than i need at the moment so i started on the backup user and systems files link.

as mentioned previously, the only thing i have on the c: drive is w7 ... no photos/music/letters/programmes ... so there's nothing i need to backup except whatever file is running control panel and i think that file is c:\windows\system32\control.exe.
trouble is, when backup gave me the choice to choose what files i wanted to backup, c:\windows wasn't on the list so i couldn't get to the .exe file.

if i'm right in my assumption, would copying the file and putting it in another folder on my d: drive achieve the result i want? if it's not control exe, then i have no idea what file to look for.

i'm not sure what i should do now.