How do I get it back to the way it was before I did whatever I did... even system restore won't go on. I get stopped with a warning file could not be opened.. When I go start menu, the screen has several sections with faded lines to categorize the internet options, then there below that is system restore icon,stuff like nero photosnap, malwarebytes, Microsoft power point, then there's the big internet explorer e swirl! Why is it down there? And it's also next to the Start button. When I click the e icon it says choose the program you want to open this file. Then there's ACT! 6.0 App, adobe acrob 7.0, adobe reader 8.2, filemaker pro,. then the box to click always use... it also has other programs and below that photoshop, downloads, so if I click to open it then says file C could not be opened. Why can't I just clilck the e icon and be on the internet like before? If I could do system restore and go back to the past date before I did something wrong... What could I have done? I tried to download the Google chrome and that won't open either. So I just want to start over. What do you recommend? And I did research how to do this and couldn't find any similar q & a's

I'm going to assume you have been trying to access System Restore from within Windows. Try doing it from Safe Mode by clicking on the F8 button every 1/2 second or so until you get to the Safe Mode screen. Select Safe Mode only (not the one with networking) and when you get almost there it will ask if you want to continue to Safe Mode or go to System Restore (so selecting NO will take you directly to restore). Before you try that though you might want to select "Last Known Good Configuration" first and restart to see if that helps before you restore to an earlier time.
From your description it seems you really screwed things up and your best bet may be to save what data you can from the C drive to another drive or DVD/CD (if it will work) and then format and reinstall. I'd tell you to do a non-destructive reinstall (leaves all your data and programs intact) but if programs are screwed up too, I don't think it would help. But for your info, when you boot to your XP CD and it sees there is already an OS on C, it will ask if you want to repair (recovery console) but ignore that one and continue as if your going to do a clean install, and soon after the Press F8 to accept license screen it will scan again and offer to repair again. That one is the non-destructive restore that will not erase your data or programs. Be aware though that all your system data will be re-written from the disk and if your disk is XP with SP1 or worse there will be a ton of critical updates to download afterword. For that reason most techs use a CD with the latest criticals and at least SP3 integrated to the disk using Nlite.