Ocelot--I was glad to read that you were able to get most of your things backed up. You could also take your hard drive out and have your documents and other info taken off, at a computer tech place. My son and I reinstall systems for people all the time. We have an adapter set that allows us to hook up any hard drive (even laptop hard drives) to one of our computers, scan the contents for viruses, etc., and then safely copy everything into a holding folder on one of our extra exterior hard drives that we keep specifically for that purpose. A tech place should be able to do the same thing...for a small fee (I would expect maybe $50). They would probably save your information to a few CDs or DVDs, or if you buy an extra hard drive, to that, and then you can keep that installed on your computer for later (I keep My Documents on my G drive just for this type of instance. Even when my system goes, there's very little I have to try to pull from my C drive to save. Mostly I can just disconnect my exterior drives and make a clean system, then connect everything back up again, and voila! I'm back in business.
Once you have saved your info, it's a snap to reinstall Windows (any type), and then you have a nice, clean computer once again. Put in any other programs you need, then start restoring your documents, etc. That way you'll still have a backup in place, at least of your current status, as well.
Good luck!
