Huge problem, PC will not boot!

[Matt_Smi]

Well I am a real Idiot! I was in the command prompt trying to delete a virus, and accidentally I removed my access rights to the system32 folder, like a moron I tired to reboot in safe mode to fix it, when I should have just used system restore to roll back the change. Now after the Windows XP loading screen a blue screen comes up that says “fatal system error” and the computer shuts the hard drive down. I believe that my computer is 100% screwed and there is nothing I can do to fix this. does anyone know what I should go about doing here? It is a Dell and I guess I am going to try calling tech support (doubt they will help). I have no idea what is going to be needed to fix this. The only fortunate thing is that all my data is backed up on my external hard drive that I bought a few weeks ago, so thankfully my data is not lost. But my computer is

[Matt_Smi]

Well I ended up staying up the whole night to re-install Windows; it was not as bad as I thought it would be. I wanted to do it sometime this summer anyway, but was putting it off. I am just really happy that I had everything backed up on my external hard drive, I have only had the thing for like two weeks, and I would have been extremely upset if I lost all of my data. This also taught me just how easy it is to mess up you computer by playing around with windows. But my computer is running great now. I also did not bother to re-install a bunch of Dell crap and other useless programs back onto my computer, so it is nice not having that junk on there.

[j4ck]

yeah, dont feel too bad. i was in a similar situation last night. My computer had contracted a virus in some sort of critical driver cabinet file and was not repairable by avast. Not realizing the importance of the file I deleted it, and not surprisingly immediatly developed some serious driver problems. So, I attempted a repair install of windows (probably what you should have tried before you clean installed) but I somehow majorly f$#c3d up the repair install and ended up just formatting my C: drive...which I had been wanting to do for a while.
I had been running the same windows installation for going on 4 years now, and I must say...a clean install (nuke and pave) *really* makes a performance difference. With my clean install I've decided to mess about with the Aston shell replacement program. Once I learn more about it, I may post a software review.