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Slightly educated GUESS from having seen something similar recently – please don’t commit to changes if things don’t look right!
Looks like you’re not presented with repair as an option YET because multiple partitions and some free space are on the drive.
I’m thinking that partition I: is a factory restore or recovery type partition which your predecessor may have unhidden and given a drive letter to in order to save elsewhere or something.
Possibly by using the arrow keys to move the cursor to the C: partition to select it, then hitting Enter, you would be presented with the option to repair once the WinXP is chosen to work with.
Typically that I: partition is hidden and has no drive letter assigned, in order to make it difficult for a user to eliminate the restore to factory option.

Please proceed cautiously, as I said I have seen this situation before BUT there’s no guarantee the situation is identical.

While Clint and Fred have given excellent advice, using the system restore discs would be a LAST RESORT situation that could possibly be avoided.If you did your upgrade to XP Pro using an installation disc you should have the ability to attempt a repair of your operating system which MAY correct the issues and also leave your installed programs and data intact so reloading isn’t needed. Even if you don’t have the XP Pro upgrade on a disc, you can d/l an ISO image legally for XP Pro install disc from several place to burn your own non-manufacturer specific version.Definitely do image backups of your system, programs and data beforehand so you can at least get back to where you are now in case the repair option doesn’t help. The suggestion of using Firefox as a replacement browser is an excellent one, and it could be a good idea to begin using FireFox and since I hadn’t seen it mentioned in your posting – d/l and run Malwarebytes AntiMalware to ensure that the issues you experience aren’t caused by virus or malware activity.The time you spend attempting to repair the system, even if it fails to help will at least give you the satisfaction of having tried everything to retain your purchased and customized programs. As you’re finding out, it’s nearly impossible to locate ALL the license keys and registration information for your programs, and the time spent reinstalling and then re-updating and patching will be considerable.Good Luck, have recently been in similar situation and repair DID work, hundreds of registered programs still working fine.

Without details on the specific guestbook application you’re using it’s difficult to help. One way to work with the spam issue is to see if the guestbook allows moderation of comments before posting live on the web. It’s a setting that may not have been noticed or understood during setup. By setting comments to moderated before posting, you would have to go in occasionally to weed out spam still, but it wouldn’t hit your webpages until after you had the chance to approve the postings.
Maybe this can help while exploring other options.

For those who allow automatic updating of your programs, I happened to notice last week that a Flash player update I allowed to occur finished properly, BUT notified me that I would have to disable my browser’s download videos plugins due to Flash not supporting file downloading properly. The warning suggested that browser and program crashes would result.

If you allowed automatic updating, one of these type issues may be what’s causing your issues. Sadly, major program providers have been almost forcing updates on users without allowing them to know ahead of time that updating that program will likely break many other things. I don’t allow automatic updating, and always double-check anything that wants to be updated and I STILL get caught sometimes no matter how hard I try to research issues ahead of time.

It sounds as if a Flash update silently killed your download vids capabilities.

In XP you may need to go into your sounds control panel applet
Volume Control panel opens, select “options”, then “properties”
Properties window opens up, there’s an “adjust volume for” box, usually that will have “playback” selected
Click on the white circle to the left of “Recording” to select and show recording volumes underneath
You should see “Stereo Mix” and “Microphone” entries, make sure both have check marks in them, and click on “OK”
Recording Control window comes up – this is where the issue lies most times. In XP (I don’t know about later versions) you can have either microphone OR Stereo Mix active.
You need to select “stereo mix” to use internal (ie internet radio) as your source, and go back to “microphone” in order to use your mic , for instance in audio chat rooms or skype.

Many times people spend a lot time troubleshooting this because of how obscure and deeply hidden the controls are.