This seems like a very complicated way to achieve your goal! It sounds like sitting yourself down and giving you a stern talking to might be a beter aporoach.

You're probably right. But, it ensures a surefire method if accomplished.

Having said that, if you have these very important files that you don't want to lose, please make sure they're backed up somewhere off of your machine. Storage fails, and it's a horrible feeling losing something important. Unfortunately doing so would defeat the approach you're thinking of.

Thank you for your concerns!

This might be a case of needing to reframe the question to get to the cause of the issue, and then solve that.

Makes sense.

So, why do you want to make it hard to reinstall your machine?

I want to set it up in a particular way to ensure maximum productivity. But I'm afraid that I'll not go through with it (as has happened a lot in the past). Thus, making it impossible to reinstall should enable me to go through. As I wouldn't have any other choice.

Is it the amount of time you spend on it

The amount of time spent unproductively. Yes.

the chance of screwing it up

Nope. I haven't had a serious breakage since over one and a half years. I think I'm managing splendidly.

needing it working

Don't really have particular problems related to keeping my system up and running.

has it become a compulsion or something else?

Not sure what you meant with this.

Maybe if we can get to the root of the issue we can find a solution.

I believe I touched upon this earlier in this comment. I just want to be very productive.

With regard to TPM, it's basically just a key store, so you can use it fir anything really, althought it's normally used by generating a TPM key and using it to encrypt the key that's actually used to encrypt your data, storing the encrypted key with the OS. Just reinstalling won't wipe the TPM, but unless you made an effort to save the encrypted key it'll be gone. Given your problem statement above it just adds to the data you'd need to save, which isn't helpful.

Uhmm..., I feel as if I should properly read up on this. Have you got any pointers you would recommend?