Any way to delete in vim without overwriting your last yank?

I love vim, but one common gotcha is:

yank a line
go to where you would like to paste it
delete what's there
paste your yank, only to discover that it pastes what you just deleted

Obviously the workflow is delete first, yank second. But it would be reeeeeaaaaaalllly nice if I didn't have to. Anyone have a trick for this? Does vim have a paste buffer that works well, or is there a .vimrc setting I can change?

Solution

Pass to the _ register, the black hole.

To delete a line without sticking it in the registers:

"_dd

See also :help registers.

It's probably safest, if you want to paste something over and over again, to yank it into a "named" register.

"aY

Yanks a line into the a register. Paste it with "ap.