Windows corrupted? Can anybody help please?

[hecate1980]

OK. It's hard to know where to start. To describe ALL of my Vista problems? That would probably become a novel. "Vista-my problem child", lol.
Brief history. Had a long strain of problems on my computer for all through the year since I bought it. Pre-installed Vista rograms stopping to work, having to download alternitives from the web. Was fighting a loosing battle with Vista for ages. Finally crashed 2 weeks ago. Reformatted hard-drive, restored it to factory condition. Well it ran amazingly smoothly for A WEEK.
One morning I found that my computer had failed with the task of going to sleep, went into disc check mode, but obviously something went very wrong from there on. The first problems I noticed was suddenly a dvd would not play on windows media center. "Files needed to play video are not installed or not working correctly." Next I noticed the sound control button would launch only a quick DOS window with a message "Program too big to fit in memory." When I went to the control panel then I saw that some buttons like Sound and Keyboard are not functional at all. The more I started to try to open programs the more faults I found. MS Works displays a message "Works cannot use the template you chose" and won't open, even though I'm using it for the first time. Msconfig, recovery manager and some other programs would only open an already described brief DOS windows with the memory problem message. It seems that my system files are corrupted? I have tried everything I could think of. Have run all the file checking tools, mem check, many virus checks. Have done system restore and nothing was changed.

Then I ran the sfc/scannow in command prompt. The result was that it got to 98 %, then says that some things could not be fixed. When I tried to open the log file it says "access denied", even though I am logged on as administrator. Next discovery- cannot access the user accounts in control panel. It gives me long error message "Windows cannot find 'shell:::{26EE0668-A00A-44D7-9371-BEB064 ......\pageAdminTasks'
What does this mean?

I would love to do a fresh install of Windows but I don't have the actual install cd, last time I did it from the D partition that has the recovery section on it, but I am unable to perform the same action this time.

One thing I have to give to Vista- I was a complete rookie when I bought this first computer of mine. Thanks to Vista and the constant troubleshooting I have got many computer lessons for free. Well if you don't count the sleepless nights, constant frustration and premature grey hair as a price to pay of course...