My son has shot himself in the foot.  It all started with a bad cluster on
his hard drive that was found and marked bad by ScanDisk.  He then
discovered that some programs no longer worked ... mIRC and Internet
Explorer 3.02.  He got MIRC working by just reinstalling.  Then the trouble
began ...

After he tried reinstalling IE, he ran into problems with Regsrv32 crashing
on loading Windows.  We found and followed Microsoft instructions to fix
this problem by deleting the Internet Temporary Files and History folders
and we seem to have gotten around this problem.  It was apparently due to a
bad ITF directory.

Then I found that he had tried reinstalling Internet Explorer from a CD.
When he got done, there were no files on the hard disk in the IE directory
except a couple of text files ... no executables or anything else.  It
appeared that he had installed it to run off the CD.  Removing and
reinstalling did not help.  I deleted what appeared to be the offending
lines in the registry (IEonCD and another one that pointed to the IE
directory on the CD) and tried reinstalling, but this did not help.  We
copied the files off my computer to his and IE now starts up, but it will
not display any Web pages.  It seems to think that we are trying to
download files rather than Web pages.  Also, when we try to edit Options,
nothing happens ... the menu just disappears.

Anyone have any suggestions on what to do before we reinstall Windows?