[jyl]

Some months ago my Win XP-powered PC died. I'd tried a stick of DRAM (scavenged from a server we were tossing out) and it corrupted my system files, so it said on bootup. Naturally I coudn't find my Win XP CD, and I've been loving the Mac, so didn't bother to try and fix it until today. So, I obtained another Win XP CD, booted from it, tried to do a "repair", it wouldn't do it for some reason. So I chose "setup" and Win XP installed fine, but appears to have wiped out all my settings, preferences, users, DLLs, "My Documents" folder, everything.

Not really a big deal - I don't keep my data in the "My Documents" folder anyway - but now I'm thinking. All the files in my "Program Files" appear to be intact, but the apps won't run since their DLLs are gone. Well, I don't use most of those apps anyway. So, can I simply delete all those "Program Files" folders and reinstall the few apps I actually want? Or should I reformat the c: drive and do a completely fresh install? I could do that, but it would be a bother to burn all the data to CD-ROM.

This is a fairly old PC, dual 600MHz P2s, and I'm trying not to putz around with it too much. Basically it'll be used for some websurfing and MS Office, the kids will play Barbie and Harry Potter, and I might play a little NFS from time to time.