Cleaning the hard drive

I have a computer, but certain components of my Panda anti-virus terminate or crash unexpectedly (namely webproxy.exe), leaving me open to threats.

I tried to run webproxy.exe, as well as avengine.exe (which I believe to be an important component of panda too), but to no avail.

I have scanned the Windows XP PC with Panda, ad-aware and spybot but found nothing.

Is it worth to try to clean the hard disk in order to remove any viruses or other problems which could be causing this?

I do not want to completely wipe it and re-install windows or anything since I have never done that before and I am unsure of whether I ever created restore disks.

Would the problem be fixed if I restored the computer to it's earliest state (which should be the factory settings)? How can I check when the earliest restore point was made?

Thank you.

 

Before doing that...if you suspect malware try this first
http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=35407

 

Assuming you are only running one antivirus, it sounds like the problem is with the Panda program itself. First try uninstalling Panda, rebooting, and reinstalling the program. The free evaluation is good for one month. If you purchased it their web support will help you out.
http://www.pandasoftware.com/com/Support/default