[H] drive won't shrink

[Winterlight]

I am working on a HP Pavilion. It has a 550GB hard drive and there is 
nothing unusual about the Win 7 Home Premium setup. It has a 195 MB 
boot drive = C. The Win 7 D drive with about 450 GB on it ...the user 
only is using 175GB of that D drive... a HP recovery drive of 24GB 
and the HP utility drive with around 100MB. I want to get rid of the 
HP stuff so I delete the two HP partitions. Next I try to shrink the 
450GB D drive down to 250 which leaves a solid 75 GB free on the 
drive. But I can't shrink it more then about 7GB because Win 7 Disk 
Manager says there isn't any space available. I have tried using Win 
7 Disk Management,   Paragon Partition Manager, and Active  Boot 
Partition Manager and they all have the same issue.

Has anybody seen anything like this before.... anybody know why it is 
doing this and what can be done about it short of backing the 175GB 
up, deleting the partition, create new partitions, and then restoring 
the backup in the smaller space?