Media Player 11,MS search and System restore problem

This is long. OK, I have several issues so I'll just lay them all out and tackle them one at a time. A few months back I installed an additional harddrive for video imaging only. The only folder I created in it was "VIDEO". Well it stayed that way for a while. Then I got a few trojans and you guys helped me get rid of them. Now I download updates and things at work to my thumb drive and bring it home to install updates on my PC. The best connnection I get at home is 24kbs. Yes it sucks but I cannot fork out $50/month at the moment for a cable line. OK, well I noticed when I installed something, don't remember what it was, that it said it was copying and installing to F#2HD). It never asked me where to put it, it did it itself. Well there have been no problems. And this was before the trojans I believe. Anyway, the problem with this is that now on #2HD there are a few alpha numeric folders and one contains an I386 folder with lots of stuff in it. I renamed it to see if XP was actually using it and PC would not boot. Can I merge this F:I386 with C:I386 like it should be? All of this happened at least several weeks ago if not a month. I said all that because I don't know if it is realted to the problem I am having now. SO Teusday, I was using Media Player 11 with no problems. Last night I tried to open it but the arrow would just turn to an hour glass for a second, then back to an arrow. I tried several ways to open it but no luck. I installed this using my thumb drive and generally I move files from my thumb drive to my C: and then install from my C:. Well I could not find it the download in my usual place. SO I did start, search, to look for it. When the search window opened it didn't look right. It gave me no where to enter what I wanted to search for nor where to look. Just a white screen. SO at this point, I am thinking system restore. SO I go there. After clicking on system restore, restore screen comes up but the page is all white, nothing displayed. So I put in my DELL XP CD -SP1. It doesn't like it, it says it's not the same as what's on my PC. I have updated to SP2 which thought might be the reason it is saying this. Everything else seems to be working as far as what we use regularly, IE7.0, Outlook, and my kids play games all the time. I don't know if one of them may have done something? But the biggest thing that bothers me is that System Restore seems to no longer be a tool for me. Also I removed MP11 and it said it would roll back the player. It was doing this but then came up with an internal error. Please help. Sorry it is so long.