After a few days of searching, I still can't find the disk for Windows XP that came with my computer. However, I did find the one that came with the old Dell. Can I use that?

as long as you have the key for the PC you are going to repair. and is that CD bootable. start pc, go into the bios and set the boot option to CD then HDD pop the cd in then if you get a message that say press and key to boot from cd... then you are in business.

yes ,but it will have limits, as it will be a recovery cd or sorts .you should be able to use it to run a repair ,but no be able to do a repair install of xp over itself

Alright, I spent a few more days looking for the CD (cleaning out shelves and desks), but still no CD. Now bobbyraw was telling me I should run a repair installation with the Windows CD, but you are saying I cannot do that with the one that came with the Dell, correct? If this is what you are saying, then is another way I can try to overcome this problem?

borrow a winxp disk and use it if you have a winxp key

I do have my key. However... explorer seems to have magically fixed itself after I rebooted my computer recently. I don't think it'll last though, so I'm going to give it a while before I conclude it fixed.

EDIT: Ah, of course, the catch. My internet problems (can't load certain pages) seem to have returned. I ran TCP optimizer, like last time, but still no fix. Apparently my internet problems were related to explorer or a program within explorer... eh, weird.

EDIT 2:Okay... now the Internet issues seem to be fixed. I honestly have no idea how these problems were fixed, so unless computers are secretly magical entities who have the capability to solve all unsolvable problems by themselves, I doubt this is permanent. I'm going to give it two days, then call it solved.

run spybot and ad-aware ,links to them in my signature

The only link I see is to the Puget Systems homepage. I'll try and find them in google and I'll come back and tell you if I did. If I haven't before you visit this page again, would you mind posting the links?

EDIT: Is it Spybot: Search and Destroy, or Spyware bot? Or neither of those?

spybot search and destroy and the links to them are on the Puget system site in my signature or just go to www.filehippo.com

Thanks for the links. I downloaded and ran both programs (Spybot: S&D and Ad-Aware). Both scans showed a decent amount of nasties that I would rather not have had on my computer, so I cleaned those up. For that, I thank you.

The Internet problem is still a bit iffy. I now can access Amazon, but I still cannot reach some other sites, such as Facebook. I also cannot upload images to sites such as imageshack and tinypic (a problem I did not mention before).