Should I delete Windows folder?

Hello to all. I just typed and lost a post so there may be a duplicate floating about. I discovered this forum on my quest for recovering MSN favorites. See, not being satisfied with perceived crumbs, I wound up with more on my plate than I could handle. Just to give a little background, I recently had to reinstall windows xp after my computer malfunctioned (clueless, as to why). What I hoped would be a simple repair resulted in my hard drive being erased and a clean reinstall. The sad part is that I didn't back up anything. Did I mention that I'm new at this? After losing all my data, I hoped to recover my email and bookmarks off the MSN server at least. I decided to do a System Restore after some research. Big Mistake. Towards the end of the procedure, my system crashed. A dialog box popped up,'restoring files', next it prompted to 'restart computer'. After the automatic restart, the Windows logo screen led to a black blank screen...NOTHING. I tried to reboot repeatedly. Finally, I called Dell Support. The first rep had me to do an f8 to attempt to reboot in safe mode which didn't work. Next, he had me press CTRL+Alt+D which relayed a fail error code 7. He then announced that my hard drive had crashed and transferred me to sales. I hung up and tried again.
The second rep had me try the f8 process several times again. Each time it was unsuccessful and cycled it back to the black blank screen. Next he led me through the Recovery Console, which worked minimally at best. He had me to do a 'chkdsk c:/r'. Finally, he had me to a f12 and a reinstall. Rather than lose more data (his words), he told me to click 'leave current files intact' at the prompt. I then installed windows into a new folder, C: WINXP. So now I have two windows folders. C: WINDOWS and now C: WINXP. The WINDOWS folder has all my program files in it. The rep told me that I could remove these files. I attempted to do so, but I don't know what I'm doing. Moreover some of them are hidden. Another thing is when I boot up, I get a black second countdown screen asking which op system I want to open (is there any way to disable this?) Should I just delete the whole WINDOWS folder? Or could something be saved? I dont want to damage my system or take up too much space in my hard drive. What do I do next?
C: WINXP- so far, I've updated windows and added the service pack 2; reinstalled verizon dsl, msn, yahoo, and downloaded a free version of Panda Antivirus Platinum 7 ( which incidently wont update itself- keeps trying to update- msg: could not connect to Panda server)

I appreciate any help or response. Thanks in advance.

Intel Celeron processor, 1.10 GHz, 256 MB RAM
Maxtor 4D040H2
Intel (r) 82801AA Bus Master IDE controller
Primary IDE Channel
Secondary IDE Channel
3Com Etherlink XL 10/100 PCI
Windows XP Home Ed, 5.1
Internet Explorer 6.0

 

OK you seem to have a pretty messed up system there. If I was in this situation, now that you can log in to windows, I would perform a fresh install of windows again, I know it's not good for your hard drive but it could seem to sort it. I'd format the drive and then install again so you'd be sorted.

OR

To sort out your choice of O/S at boot up perform these steps -

Start>right click my computer>advanced tab>click settings under "Startup and Recovery">Edit. A notepad file should appear, delete whichever isn't the choice you use to boot from, I think you should be deleting the second line, you'll have 2 lines of text that should say something like "multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn" - delete one of these lines of text ok??!!!

Now that should sort out the booting options, as to the folder delete, can you right click each folder and find out when they were last modified? I think that the one that was last modified will be your current O/S, and the one that wasn't modified previously will be the one you can delete. Post the date and times of when they were last modified and other details if you can.

 

Maybe I'll do the reinstall. It seems the least complicated route, just frustrating. It will be the third time around. Oh well,.......

Thanks for your help, mcadam88.