Plz need a little help concerning user accounts

[smartintelleng]

So heres what happened, I had just finish fixing my computer, than restarted it only to find out it wouldnt start. I am a university student, and was in desperate need of my computer moreso for the files on them, so i installed windows xp pro sp2 over the other windows xp pro sp2 not formating or partition the drives cause the files that were on there are important to me. Doing so, while making a different user account named eric(during installation) because i was scared that windows would delete the files for my old user account named whatever. So my other account is namely still there, in documents and settings under the folder whatever which represents my old user account. The problem is, that windows doesnt consider the folder whatever as an account. So i tried making an account named whatever hoping that windows would use the folder whatever. Instead it made a new folder called whatever.ERICORE. ERICORE was my computer name that i chose during installation. Oh i forgot to mention that i found a way to access the folder whatever and all its contents because typically before it was a protected user account; this is a security feature in xp among other OS. So now im left with a folder called whatever which i can access anything, which is ok, but the question is how do I make that folder whatever, which is again in documents and settings as all user accounts are found, how do i make it a user account, so that it can load all my programs as it did before with my whatever account. If there is no solution to this problem, im stuck finding, downloading and installing hundreds of software, to rehabilitate my computer to do all the tasks it did with my old account whatever. I am very knowledgeable and more than competent in computers( for example i am a visual c++ programmer)
Thanks for beeing considerate and reading this
Your help is appreciated.

[gemini4]

What you did is called parallel instalation. There is no way of accessing the programs from the old installation unless you repair it. What you can do now is backup all your files on cd's and then boot from the windows xp cd and choose to repair the old installation.

[tayspen]

Yea, he ^ is right from what i gathered from your post. it was kinda confusing at times. It also sounded like you wanted to set the path of the My documents folder to the "whatever" folder? Is that correct, or am i way off.