Originally Posted by Grimulus

yeah, whoever said the thing about the system restore. good thinking. i totally forgot about that. be sure and do a system restore, and if you don't have it, when the comp is fixed be sure to turn it on and restore...it's a life saver. i've also had this problem with microsoft word and had to delete the *.dat files. i'm sure about 99.9% this isn't the case however. but yeah if you aren't losing anything you REALLY need, i would do a clean format. sounds like things are screwed up pretty good. get a good spyware program like spybot 1.3, and an adware remove program like lavasoft's ad-aware and be sure to run an anti virus in safe mode that is updated.
alright, gotta go to the doctor. laters
hope you get things working!