Situations like this are why I've always (ever since the days of Win 3.1) had a separate drive for the system and one for data. Drive C is system and D is data. Sometimes D is just partition, most of the time it is a second physical drive. That way when everything goes south and the recommended fixes don't fix things, I can just reformat C and re-install windows without losing my data. Why reformat C? just to make sure that everything bad is gone. If I was really super cautious, I'd always have a second drive for data and rebuild the partition table on C, just to make sure that nothing was lurking there.
<<Edit: Subject edited for clarity>>
Message Edited by TomV on 09-07-2009 12:50 AM