Avast will no longer load up; nor will Chrome (though Firefox and IE work fine) or most other applications. They give me an error: "The application failed to initialize properly (0xc0000135). Click OK to terminate the application". I did a bit of research and most sites claim I need to reinstall .NET. Unfortunately the install .exe that's available throws the same 0xc0000135 error, so I'm a catch-22. Even if that's not the exact problem, I've tried to redownload avast and several other files to reinstall them and it's the same thing for their install programs. I can't run an effective system restore, because the only restore point I have is the automatic one which ran after the Avast repairs.

My only idea at the moment is to copy as many .dll files from the Windows folders on another machine and overwrite the ones I already have. Starting that process now, but I suspect it will be long and painful and has a low chance of success. Anyone have other ideas?