I need a tech geek

[Kogahazan]

My computer has been f'd up the a...

A lot of applications won't work, suddenly my XP Home edition has a login screen that looks like XP Professional and when shutting down, the shut down is a XP Professional shut down screen but it still says home edition on that and the login screen, and now the task bar and start menu is all screwy...

I cannot open applications like Firefox and media players. The error message says the path name of the program, and then says "This application has failed to start because the application configuration is incorrect. Reinstalling the application may fix this problem."

I googled to find something, but didn't find anything clear... Everything I saw had something to do with C++ and Visual C++ and maybe Visual Basic, I'm not sure...

I used this thing called Dependency Walker to find what modules the applications relied on to function... At first it said the applications were missing efsadu.dll and msjava.dll so I downloaded this and copied them to the WINDOWS folder, system folder, and system32 folder...
Then it said they were missing mpr.dll and I downloaded and copied it into the same directories, except it was already in the system32 folder and was already in use...

I'm stuck... I reformatted a few weeks ago and I don't want to reformat again...

[Arcana]

What did you do that put your computer in this state, out of curiosity?

[Kogahazan]

No idea... it just happened randomly a few days ago

[Arcana]

The amount of effort to diagnose and repair the problem will probably be greater than the amount of effort required to do a format -> reinstall.

I mean, you do keep regular backups, right?

.... right?

[Kogahazan]

Yeah, I do have an external drive where I can transfer all the important stuff... But I just got through installing all these programs and auto updates... I don't want to do it again if there is a reasonably good solution.