my dad bought the WG311 v3 wireless adapter from netgear for his computer. after installing the software it disabled user switching and logon…only the administrator that installed the software could logon. it said I had to uninstall the software so I did and next time I tried to find a way to just install the device driver without the software…well I did and then windows wouldent boot…it said NTLDR missing so I booted from the XP disc to do a repair…I ran bootfix…it didnt work. then I ran mbrfix(master boot record) and that didnt work…I also copied ntldr and ntdetect to root from XP cd. now here I am with the harddrive in my computer on vista and Im looking at the drive with computer management\disc management and it shows the drive as a single partition with 76.33GB FAT file system (which is correct) but if you explore the drive or check its properties it says there is only 10MB total space with 3.4MB used the only files on the drive are ntldr and ntdetect
wyntry is absolutely right(I especially like your reply to dwight lol) but I ran out of text space for the original question(evil 1000 character limit)…anyway as for that downloadable hotfix I did find that and wanted to use it but I made the mistake of researching the problem after trying to fix it myself and thanks to that wrongly installed driver I cant boot to windows to install the fix. thing is…I was going to reinstall XP but as I mentioned b4 even tho it is an 80GB HD and disc manager sees that…explorer itself only sees it as 10MB and when I go to install XP thats all it sees as well. so it wants me to format the drive but thats not an option for me as there are important things on the disc…is there a way to access the data so I can copy it to my HD’s on my computer so I can reformat the drive safely and then reinstall XP? that looks like what Im gonna have to end up doing…I just dont know how to access the "vanished" data on the drive…

ok. so i did some looking around. and downloaded some programs. and so far i have tried avast antivirus, avira antivirus, and avg antivirus and have come up with no virus results. i have also tried some spyware programs and have not had any spyware threats on my comp. i have tried to use glary utilities to clean my registry and remove junk files . this makes it worse. i have used ccleaner and that did absolutely nothing. have defragged my system even tho it said it didnt need defragged. and have advanced windows care installed.

some people have told me that the problem with my computer is that i download and install too many programs and have too many things running in the background. i have since uninstalled a lot of programs and have had no improvement.

is there anything short of reinstalling the OS, that i can do with my computer to clean up junk files, or find what the problem is? right now it takes 5 min to open a new tab in firefox. and i have maxed at 3,000 page faults/s