The Continuing Saga of ProtoWulf

So. Here's what it's come down to. I'll be picking up my computer from Staples tomorrow afternoon, handing over the forty bucks of ransom for doing little more than tell me it wasn't a virus and backing up my C drive. My D drive has over 20 gigs of material, and is way too goddamn expensive to even consider backing up by their rates.

Facts.

I have an HP Pavilion 6635 computer with an OS corruption problem. It will boot up, but will not load a single program, spouts a few C++ runtime errors and does nothing. Of course, the HP 6635 is so old that HP no longer supports it, period.

I do have the recovery discs for this computer. Unfortunately, Windows 2000 was not the original OS. Windows ME was.

Yes, I cringed, too.

See, when I put the extra hard drive in, the friend that did the good job of it put in Windows 2000, but did not give me the OS discs that went along. No reinstall, no system recovery.

Reformatting the computer at Staples would mean that the file formatting on my D drive, and all the files I've saved in Windows 2000 since its installation, would need backing up, reformatting, and then re-depositing, but leaving me with Win ME. If I need to access those files again and alter them in PhotoShop for re-focusing on my Art Major, I'm hooped.

If I had any discs to reinstall or restore Windows 2000, I could do that to the C drive and continue on my merry way with no file formatting conflicts. I don't have those.

My parents are pretty focused on attempting to save the computer any way they can. There are a few tech-savvy people I could try speaking to; Dad's set on watching a few Windows Repair CD programs on eBay to give it a shot... but honestly, without the OS discs, I don't even think that could work.

I may work in internet tech support, but the most I know about computers in this situation is to avoid Win ME like the plague it is. I'm begging for any and all input from those who know far more than I.

Or should I not even be considering a Windows 2000 reinstall, cut my losses, find a new machine, and transfer my D drive data over to that one? Through the insane generosity of a close friend, I may have a computer to use in the interim, but is this one salvageable?

(crossposted to my personal journal and to tech_support