Help! I think my 32bit is dead on Vista x64

I am currently running a dual boot, with Vista Home Prem x64 and XP MCE. I have not used vista an about a week but today logged in to check out Crysis in Dx10. I went to check my email and noted that Firefox and IE7 were not working. IE7 64 bit does work. I did a Google and found that this is a somewhat common problem, that for some reason the x32 portion of Vista x64 gets hosed. The only solution seems to be a)System restore or, b) reinstall Vista. This info is from Feb-April of this year. I am wondering if, before I go at a reinstall, has anyone discoverd any other solution? I do not have any system restore points so a reinstall may be my only option.

This is the only Thread I found that seems to describe it well.
http://forums.microsoft.com/techne [...] 0&pageid=0

And this guy seems to know what's up with it but his "Fix" sucks for me.

" Here is what has happened.

You have blown out you 32 bit layer interface in Vista.

Any program that runs at 32 bit will not work properly.

Hence IE 7 standard will not work;but the 64 bit version will.

You can verify this by finding and downloading the 64 bit version of firefox. Its in beta but is available. you need to do a google search. All this will do is confirm whats going on. Anything that runs at 32 bit will not be able to access the network. Virus definitons cannot update, Any program that checks the internet for updates will not work.
Now the serious part. The only way I know of fixing this short of reinstalling Vista is go back to a restore point that was created and is available still. This restore point has to be prior to the problem occuring. If it is; run a system restore. My problem was I; went 1 week before trying a system restore ;so it would not work. Short of that a complete reinstall is required which is what I had to do."

I just got it the way I wanted it and a reformat would take 4 ever not to mention the risk of messing up my bootini leaving my XP install unuseable.

Ok took a LONG time searching Microsoft's forums but I found it. The Winsock got screwed up. The fix is as follows incse anyone else has this issue.

1. Click Start , type cmd in the Start Search text box, and then
press ENTER.
2. Type the following command, and then press ENTER:
netsh winsock reset
3. Restart the computer.""

NOTE: Must use cmd as admin

Hope this can help someone. After a bit of searching I found the problem many times but only one post with a solution that does not involve a clean install of Vista.