I'm stumped - maybe y'all might know...

I'm having an issue that first manifested itself in my "favorites" in IE. I launched it one day, and my favorites were gone - but only in IE... I can still get to them and use the shortcuts manually, but the menu in IE is truncated. This wouldn't be a HUGE concern, except that whatever is causing this problem is also preventing me from installing a lot of software. Every time I go to install "Alcohol 120%" for example, it tells me "Error 1606. Could not access netowork location - %USERPROFILE%\Favorites\"
I have removed all the adware I could find, and removed any malicious looking software from the machine, and cleaned out the registry pretty well with the help of a friend that knows his stuff pretty well. We checked all the reg locations with regedit when we were done, and all the locations for the favorites folders are dead on.
I'm ALMOST at the point of just wiping the drive and starting over, but I know from experience that if you don't fix the problem, it's bound to happen again later, and I'm all for learning how to fix this.

My system - Compaq Presario S5100NX (2.6ghz celeron), 1gig RAM, 80gig HD, CD/DVDROM, Raedon 9250 PCI graphics card running XPsp2.

 

Have you tried a repair installation of windows lately? If so, this can cause this issue.

 

When the problem first manifested itself a year or so ago (yeah, that long now...), my first instinct was to try to do some sort of a repair install, so I "removed" IE and reinstalled (at the time not aware that it wasn't removing anything related to the problem), and then picked up a new XP disc to try to patch it up that way. I tinkered around with it for a little while, but didn't get very far as the new disc has only offered a "full install". If there's another option for a so-called "repair install" I'd be glad to try it. Also, I should mention, that as I was removing random software last night, I came across a number of pieces of software that gave me the exact same error while trying to uninstall. I was able to remove them manually, and then fix the reg accordingly, but the uninstallers came to a grinding halt.

 

The repair option MAY(cant remember its ME for me) located on the second screen after hitting full install(in xp) or if you have sp2 installed(recently) thereare known problems--thoo that may not apply here

anyxpprosoutthere

 

Fixed it! I was browsing my registry and found an entry that was listed as REG_SZ instead of REG_EXPAND_SZ. Apparently this makes a difference. I deleted it and created a new one, and everything seems to be fine now. Thanks for the help though!