System restore not working

[harfenuegle]

Hello everyone, my situation is catastrophic. This morning I was planning for my employer to drop off his "sick" laptop at my house when he calls me up and explains how his assistant's computer at the office is not working.

As soon as I got there I started questioning the other employees about what happened the previous day. Apparently, there was an Office 2000 installation at 7:33 p.m. This was installed on top of an Office XP installation.

The first thing I tried was also the worst, I put in the Office XP cd and ran the Office repair feature. After it supposedly repaired the installation, it rebooted and I loaded Outlook. (situation critical) All of the EMAIL and CONTACTS were not there and it had basically defaulted to nothing-ess.

When I load Outlook, I get this error message if it's any help:
:Unable to open your default e-mail folders. The .DLL file for the information service could not be found.
MAPI was unable to load the information service PSTPRX.DLL. Be sure the service is correctly installed and configured.:

So my assessment is that both Office XP & Office 2000 premium w/SR1 are installed on the computer. The system is running Windows XP professional w/SP1. It is also possible that, before I started working here(so I wouldn't know), the Office XP installation was an upgrade from 2000 premium. Nobody seems to know.

I then attempted to run a system restore, which I've never done before. On the 19'th, it shows the 2000 installation @ 7:33 p.m. with some "hot-fixes" @ around 5:30 p.m. for a product unknown, possibly Office XP. Somebody probably tried to run the update, screwed it up, and decided to re-install Office, not realizing they were installing an older version.

My underlying problem is that when I try to run system restore, after selecting the restore point and rebooting, the program keeps telling me that it was unable to complete the restore (which would probably fix the problem, i hope?!). I went to Microsoft's site and read through the troubleshooting guides but found nothing. If it helps, the computer only has between 900 Megs and 1 Gig of space left on a 7 Gig drive.

Ideally, I would like to remove the 2000 installation without putting the Outlook information in jeopardy. I would also like to recover the "lost" Outlook information, which WAS there in the morning, before the "Repair" I did.

Any help in this matter is greatly appreciated, Thank-you.

[SethCohen]

My Laptop also wont 'restore' the problem, is unknown to me. The PC's are pretty old though I presume? The fact there isnt much space left on the harddrive wont be a compiling factor, but other than that its quite miffed. OfficeXP and Office 2000 are differant in many ways, so as both were, somehow installed onto the same PC, many of the files have become curropted by the looks of things.

As for looking up your old files etc, look in your documents and settings, and the route for Outlook, which should be in Program Files. After retirving and backing them up, I suggest wiping both 2000 and XP off, and reloading XP. This should then sort it out.