Having some windows problems

I have always kept my XP machine clean - no viruses, adware or malware (won't even dl msn plus). But I may have caused some damage with my own destructive removal of slightly annoying things. I recently used hijackthis to remove startup entries for a load of internet explorer things. Since then no programs are loading on startup, not msn, not the sound icon, nothing. And I have to wait about 10 minutes for the windows bar thingie to stop showing the hourglass icon when I hover over it. So I restored the backup that hijackthis made and it didn't fix the problem at all (by the way I have told control panel to show the sound icon and I have set msn to run on startup). I could manually add a shortucut to the msn executable in the startup folder but I don't know how to get the useful volume icon back. Anyone have any ideas?

System restore perhaps? Sorry I can't help much more than that ...