Computer is messed up

I'm posting from Cherie's computer. Mine either caught something or I messed it up. I had opened an email that seemed familiar and important. It was just four lines of nonsense sentences. Something like "Mary had a red lamb and took it to the mountains". I closed it as fast as I could. Not sure if I caught something there but it's likely. Anyway, what happens now is a screen opens on start up that says "We encountered a problem and PadExe must close" or something like that. Then you must click on a close button. The computer just gets busy with something that it runs real slow and freezes up. When I click on "start" and then on "Help and support" nothing happens other than a quick flicker of the screen. Then when I click on the "Restore" button it comes up with a blank page. Some of the links I tried to find a way to fix this just brought up my HP scanner software, which is defective anyway. Both of my spy ware programs, AVG and Spysweeper, freeze up before completing. So did the Malware removal tool I downloaded from Microsoft. Any ideas? Should I reload windows XP?

There have been lots of wonderful things happening that i haven't written about. The wonderful things make us busy nowadays. Everything froze out here but we have some lettuce. Scooter, our little stray dog, disappeared. Odds are he was coyote food. We had just decided to allow him to come in the house and were going to have him fixed so he wouldn't pee in the house. He got to stay inside two nights. We let him out in the morning and that's the last we saw of him. We feel bad and miss him but that's the way it is out here. It's the law of the wild.

Hopefully I'll get this thing fixed. I've got over two hundred pictures we've taken recently. Just hope we don't lose them. There are about ten thousand pictures on my laptop and none have been backed up for about a year now. I forgot how to do it and couldn't figure it out again so that was it.

Gotta go