How do you make System Restore work?

[jwfilion]

Newbie here. I have a computer with XP Home and never needed such things as System Restore, however, I made the mistake of upgrading Firefox 1.x to 3.x and now an acceleration program I was given by my ISP will not work on the upgrade. For dial up connections, this program works great, but the new Firefox won't support it because the program does not have secure upgrades. I didn't have any problems with Firefox 1.x, so I thought I'd try the System Restore, instead of all the uninstall/install hassle. Thing is, I can't seem to figure out how it works! I went into Start>Control Panel>System Properties and it just tells me what it does. It is monitoring the C Drive, but that's all it tells me. I went into the System Tools folder in the Accessories section and clicked on System Restore, but nothing happens. I thought I would try Windows Help, but then I get an error message " Windows cannot find 'helpctr.exe' ". I found "helpctr.exe" in the Windows service pack, but it won't open. What is going on? I don't recall ever using the Windows Help before, so this is new to me.
Can anyone help with this? Maybe a tutorial on System Restore from some website? Should I even be using it for something like this. I would appreciate your response to both these issues.

Wayne

[glc]

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555472

I'd uninstall Firefox - it's easy to do.