I inadvertantly destroyed the System Restore (or perhaps a Trojan I removed did it first) on a computer. The extent of that damage included the properties of My Computer. When I loaded the Properties screen for My Computer and clicked the System Restore tab, I got an MS error message and a frozen in place My Computer. And a long, long wait for the Process Manager to close it (actually, I used another process manager because I didn't think Windows' version was ever going to do it.
I found that this has been a common issue in the past with a number of different but unsuccessful attempts to get it fixed. The suggestion I thought most likely was some site's suggestion to reinstall System Restore by using sr.inf, but the problem there was that it needed the XP SP3 package. Now most of us updated an earlier version of XP to SP3 and few us were able to combine the original XP installer with the SP3 update (it's a complicated process that involves having an XP installation CD which many of us don't have). So that meant that we would be out of luck.
What I tried in lieu of that was downloading the SP3 installation CD iso, which is intended for large businesses that need to update numerous computers. Here is the URL to the correct page: XP SP3. Just click on start download on that page. Even though SP3 was already on the system, the installation CD did a reinstall/repair without damaging any of the settings.
The result was a really cleaned up system. System Restore was itself restored to perfection, as was the Properties panel of My Computer.
If you want to use this, you need an application to burn the image of the ISO to a CD. Just copying the download ISO to a CD is useless. There is excellent software out there that does this for free, but I don't know what it is. Nero does it. I use a tiny program called Sonic RecordNow! which is a gem for this kind of thing, but I hear there are better and free apps out there.
The installation of SP3 is itself lengthy. So long, in fact, that you might think nothing is happening. It took half-an-hour for the installation files to get loaded from the CD, with a barely creeping progress bar.
I mention this here for two reasons.
1. After you have cleaned up malware, your computer might be in grevious disrepair. Short of rebuilding the Windows files (which breaks a lot of configuration settings) or reimaging (which breaks everything), I hadn't known much of what to do about repairing missing or broken files. This was a blessing for me.
2. We have suggested (even proven) frequently on these boards that some of the issues with NIS were really problems with system configuration. If someone were inclined to pursue this, he could try the SP3 reinstallation (totally up-to-date as of today with all updates to the best of my knowledge) and see if it helps the situation.