Don’t be so hard on yourself Shad1983. Welcome to Computer Hope.
As you can see by my number of posts here, I'm not an expert. Far from it. However, I have some knowledge that may be of help.
I've gone through what you have and here's what I've learned. Actually, I stumbled upon this one last week, I hope it works in XP for you. Here goes:
What I did was to take my Win2k CD and boot from it into the "repair Windows" mode (I'm using a MSFT factory disc, not a DELL/HP/GATEWAY 'image' disc that comes with every machine out of the box).
I followed the on screen inst's to the point where I am asked what location do I want to install Win2k to? I typed in, "C:\WINNTALT" (the normal location is “C:\WINNT”).. This installed a clean basic version of Windows on my active partition, without disturbing any other files or folders, so as to be able to boot again. Note: I did NOT install over top of anything. I installed a 2nd windows folder - hope this makes sense.
I had the keys to the kingdom back.
Now I boot up and a black screen simply asks me which installation of 2000 I wish to load. I select the 1st/top "Windows 2000" that is listed. You should see XP of course.
Next, log on as Admin (you will see 2 Administrator accounts - use the one who's name is longer the just "Adminstrator").
You will want to dload: AVG free from grisoft.com (you have to dig on grisoft's site to get to the free version, so Googling may be faster), and Spybot Search & Destroy.
Scan your pix and any other files you wish to save with AVG/Spybot and then move them to an external drive of some sort.
I assume you want wipe your infected drive and reinstall XP, so run Killdisk from a floppy to zero-fill the HDD and then reinstall Windows and re-import files from your external drive and dload what else you need to get back to where you want to be.
There is still a ton of info you need on computer security, to keep from having a repeat of this again in the future.
Good luck!
