Long story short, I lost power while running CHKDSK, and had to spend the rest of the week rebuilding partitions and MBRs. My PC boots just fine now, but I have to go through the annoying little process of choosing one of two "recovered" Windows 7 installations (I could just let the 30 second timer run down, since the default selection is the one I want, but I'm in a hurry). Is there a quick and dirty way of removing the one I don't need from the list without formatting or restoring from a system image or anything else that would result in losing lots of data (data that I want to keep, not the OS data I want to remove)?

Isn't it possible to disable one in msconfig?
It certainly was in WIn XP, not sure about 7.

For Windows 7 or Vista, yes, use EasyBCD, which is excellent.

For Windows XP, use bootcfg from the command line; or in unusual cases that bootcfg can't handle, find the file boot.ini and edit it in Notepad.

I'm going to have to give that a try, it looks really useful.

I'll look at it and let you know how I like it. In the mean time, I found that if I go to Control Panel > All Control Panel Items > System (or just right click My Computer and click Properties), click System Protection, then click on the Advanced tab, and then click on the Settings button under Startup and Recovery, I can just untick the box next to "Time to display list of operating systems:", which forces the default selection chosen in the drop-down menu right above said tickbox. It's still prudent to leave "Time to display recovery options when needed:" ticked.


{EDIT}
EasyBCD did the trick (though I had to install an older version because NeoSmart wants money for the newest). I was able to remove the errant entry, and remove the "(Recovered)" annotation from the OS label, just to sate my OCD.

The latest version is free for personal use, just underneath the buy now button at the bottom of this page is a link that says "Download free for limited, non-commercial use". :P

I really hate it when they hide that shit out of the way like that. I think I'm going to eschew the damn thing entirely in favour of an Open Source Alternative. Call it "being prideful", but I don't like dealing with sneaks if I don't have to.

Fair enough. Are any of those actually configuration tools for the Vista/7 bootloader? Most of them appear to be alternative bootloaders.

Yeah, those are mostly Linux bootloaders set up to use with Windows. This will NOT do what the OP wants, which is to alter the BCD to avoid presenting obsolete choices in the Windows boot menu. Only a BCD editor will do that.

You can't get a better BCD editor than EasyBCD, though there are some alternatives if you don't like the license terms. BellaVista may be the best of the alternatives.

(Linux bootloaders just chainload Windows partitions. If your Windows partition had a BCD bootloader dropped on it (for example, if you dual-boot Windows XP and 7), all the Linux bootloader does is chainload to the XP partition, which then runs the BCD bootloader that W7 dropped in it.)