In the middle of a system restore my Acer laptop crashed. After restarting,
it runs most programs without problem but some are giving me hassles. In
particular, Windows XP Home has lost its help system, including restore.
Explorer and Outlook Express will not follow hyperlinks nor will they print.
Nortons will not work so must be reinstalled.

I can easily return the system to as-new factory state but then have to
reload all software and data. The OEM disks don't have a repair option for XP
and there are no XP disks. I want to fix up this mess without reloading
everything.

Option 1 - Will it work to buy Windows XP Home and load that on top of the
damaged OEM program?

Option 2 - Will it work to buy Windows XP Pro and load that over XP Home,
either as an upgrade or a full program? I suspect that an upgrade may carry
some of the problems through without repairing them.

Option 3 - Will the XP repair option work if I insert someone else's Windows
XP Home program disk into my CDRom drive?

Any help will be greatly appreciated.