Internet Explorer 7 total crash

Google is usually my friend but today has failed me. Here goes my problem:

I updated my friend's yahoo browser as prompted to the IE8 for yahoo browser. It installed but would not connect properly. I could not get the configuration correct so in attempt to just put everything back to original state, I did a system restore. This didn't work. IE8 is still present and now just crashes unless I start it without addons. Unfortunately, started without addons you can't use the addon manager. Sooo, I uninstalled IE8 the best I could. I then manually removed all the leftovers via windows explorer and regedit.exe and then I restarted and reinstalled with IE7 which is what was there before all this started. Now all it will do is the same thing. It crashes immediately after startup unless you start it without addons. Here's the kicker, so I expect few answers: THE INTERNET OPTIONS CPL APPLET ALSO CRASHES IMMEDIATELY AFTER OPENING IT WHETHER IE IS UP OR NOT.

Yeah I'm totally stumped here. I've parsed the hard drive for addons and the registry in attempt to disable them all outside of IE. It still crashes. My only option left in my mind is to wipe the drive and reinstall windows xp. I hate to have to do that seeing how my friend has soooo much software installed it is not funny. Some of it I do not have copies of and she has no restore disk whatever... not even one of those annoying recovery partitions on lots of prebuilts.

So there it is. I hope someone can help me out here. She thinks the problem is something I've done to her computer. All I've done was to accept the yahoo browser update prompt, uninstall previous browser then install the IE8 for yahoo and then everything has gone downhill from there. Yup. Thanks in advance for any suggestions, helpful or not.




PS - I do have a 10# mini sledge standing by just in case, lol