Hello,

A lengthy opening question with an introduction and thanks in advance (hopefully).

I am experiencing some problems with my computer, I have an e-machines 5220, with Windows XP. I am fairly lacking in knowledge with computers though I am willing to understand more. So please be kind!

I mainly use the comp for games and installed The Sims about 10 days ago. I then (foolishly) visited some websites and downloaded new skins and objects.

There was an issue with unzipping the files as my partner had already downloaded a program to unzip (Winrar) and the trial period had expired. I looked into it...realised we didn't even need it as XP has an unzipper and so tried to uninstall it. It won't go!

So I searched on google, found a program which claimed to clean up hard drives inc programs which won't uninstall. I downloaded this as a trial version (Ace) and ran it. It still didn't remove the dodgy file and seems now to have caused undue chaos.

I also tried to manually delete the still unzipped files in the Sims game and reinstall that. It won't install at all. I panicked....and went to an earlier system restore point. No joy...and by this point I have no idea whats going on. Demo programs that were unistalled have reappeared due to going back to an earlier system checkpoint and bits of programs are still hanging around.

I tried to uninstall these using the add/remove programs but I think that by this point in the disaster so many bits are missing and mixed up that it won't let me uninstall anything giving me various error mesages for the different programs and causing add/remove programs to freeze up. So I tried to uninstall them manually.

Can you guess the rest? It's a mess, I want to completely reinstall XP but my partner has many, many hours of music on here and it will be expensive to buy something to back it up on. Is there an easier way to find the solution?