How many MBs of files do you need to back up before a reinstall? If you could burn some CDs that might be better or borrow an external hard drive from a friend... or absolutely worst case senario, you could purchase one of the USB cases for hard drive (normally in the neighborhood of $25 USD -- you have to shop around a little, but it is worth it) and find any hard drive you have lying around and use it to back up your data. Then I would go ahead and reinstall Windoze... if it must be at the level of ME, I would opt for 98 SE, but otherwise I would find myself a copy of Windows 2000 or if you have XP, the more the better... and do a complete reinstall.
Hope this helps.
