trache

All your usual documents should be stored in C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\My Documents and you may want to browse your full Documents and Settings folder as a whole for things you may want to keep.

A.

If you just want to recover your stuff quickly, follow this option:

Have someone physically take your hard drive out of the computer, install it into another computer, and recover anything you like - the new computer will just see your hard drive as a second hard drive. You will have to then reformat your hard drive or just install Windows into a different directory see option B.

B.

Barring that, my suggestion would be to reinstall Windows into another totally separate directory on your hard drive. During the installation of Windows you have the option of installing Windows into a different directory other than C:\WINNT or C:\WINDOWS

Mind you once you do that, the two versions of Windows that are now on your PC know nothing about each other, and because of this, even though your programs are still located on your hard drive, they are no longer visible in the new Windows registry and therefore reinstallation of all your programs is neccessary.


I do not recommend that you use the Windows administrator account for any casual computer use in the future.

I do recommend posting a question or two here before you do anything drastic such as a Windows reinstall -- we may be able to solve your problem before a similar situation occurs.

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"You looked at me as if I was eating runny eggs in slow motion." - Gord Downie of The Tragically Hip