I am trying to restore my Acer Aspire One D255E to Factory Defaults but the restore is stalling at "Installing Cleanup" phase, it has been on this phase for over 8 hours. What should I do?

First of all, the other people apparently don't read before they post.
The Acer Aspire D255E has NO CD ROM, thus no restore disks, etc.
There is a factory restore option, but I'm having the same problem, the restore option simply does not work. These crappy computers keep a spare partition hidden on the hard drive, which contains all the data needed for the factory restore. However, if something happens to this partition or this data (say it's accidentally formatted), then the factory restore will fail, having lost the backup.

I've tried using Win XP on a flash drive using WinToFlash to copy the windows cd to a flash drive and make it bootable. However, I think my win xp version is a win98 upgrade, and so my next step is to make a bootable win98 flash drive. I'm about to try that and hope for the best.

If you've got windows 7 (which the Aspire One normally comes with),
then you should have much less trouble getting this step to work.

As a side note, if you have a BIOS password you need to break, do the following:

1. Unplug the AC cord and the battery.
2. Hold down FUNC and ESC and don't let up.
3. Plug in a flash drive containing the Acer One BIOS
(which you should find easily on the web).
4. Plug in the AC cord (still holding down those 2 keys)
5. Turn on the power, and wait. The flash drive may light up for a moment, and the laptop may seem to be doing nothing, but it is!
Keep holding down FUNC and ESC, maybe 2 minutes, then the Aspire One will power itself off. At this point, the BIOS is reinstalled, and the password is gone.