Problems with a bunch of things

Hi Everyone,

How are you all doing? This is my first time to post in these forums, although it is not my first time to post in forums.Since the computer I have is a Dell computer. It is a Dimension 8200 Desktop.
My mom also has a Dell computer, Dimension 8300 Desktop.
I also hope this is the correct forum to post in, because I have tried in other parts of the forums for days and it's not working right. When I try to submit my post it keeps getting lost due to several reasons. One reason it seems because when I hit save, it is asking me for a file I want to upload. I'm not trying to upload any files, so I don't understand why it's doing this. My mom's computer is what I'm using right now because of mine not working right, but it does also hook up to mine too, hers isn't working right either, and maybe even messed up too due to the same reasons my is messed up.

Anyways, I have had so many problems over the years. The recent problems was caused by what someone did through the Remote Access way. They were trying to help me with backing things up, and they did things I did not want them to do. I tried to stop them from doing things. Since over the years, we all have learned the hard way, after so many have messed up our stuff, by doing the wrong things, and causing new problems and don't fix the original problems.
Let me first explain why I need help backing things up. Due to health issues, physical problems, after awhile of doing certain things over and over again, gets to where I can't do it anymore.
One of the problems I keep having after people mess with the computer is getting back into accounts that were working just fine before they messed with things.
Which yes, that is one thing that is happening since my friend did Remote Access. But the other thing is that he renamed all my files. Which I tried to tell him not to do this, since I never did this, and it works just fine, and plus he was going to name them to things that I already have for files, so I think it's overwrote stuff, and all. I don't know. It's hard to figure out what is going on since now he wont even help any further. I keep trying to get him to tell me what he renamed things to since I can't seem to find things that use to be there or the file he said he was going to rename things to.

But the other thing is the way he says he is going to do things too, he writes or something similar.
Here is a list of things he wrote, which I'm hoping it will maybe help on what all we need to do to find and fix things. So, it's hard to know exactly what characters he even put for the names of the files. But also, I think both of our email systems or something else are also somehow changing and adding characters too. Sometimes I'm not sure if there are suppose to be a space between things. Like the word index and the number 2,  so
index 2
or is it suppose to be combined together
index2
or is is suppose to be an underscore
index_2
Also, I thought that extensions need to have a period before it. So, .html .htm
.css .jpg .gif .js
Here is things he wrote to me in emails about what he was going to do:
1. "We must rename all index.html files to index_2.html (or something similar which is different from index.html).
2. "I might have renamed the files back to index.html instead of index2.html.  I forget... but I know that the
index2.html was just supposed to be temporary... I think I renamed them back to index.html"
3. "Yeah, you can rename them back to index.html instead of index2.html.  We needed to do that to enable the directory display (as you noticed).  That was helpful for downloading files, but it disables the automatic loading of index.html.  So it was supposed to be temporary.  Let me know if you want help ranaming the files back to index.html."

The 1st one you see, began happening in August of 2009, which is when he was helping me back things up.
That 3rd one I got in November 9, 2009
So, as you can see, it took this long to get him to tell what all he has done.

After he renamed the files:
1. it keeps saying at the top of the screen "Warning no index.htm or index.html files" in all red.
Due to what an old computer we have use to do all the time, kept saying "No operating system found" is very scary whenever things like this happen.

One of the other problems I'm having is with settings for the Display of the computer are not in the drop down menu thing anymore. Like when I try to do the colors of the taskbar, buttons, etc..., things that use to be there are not there anymore. Blue is not there anymore, and Windows XP is not either, which Windows XP came already installed on the computer.
The other thing too, is I'm scared that if I had to do a reinstall of Windows completely, I'm not sure how this would work since the A drive and one 1 of the others are not the original ones that came with the computer.
So, will this cause any kinds of problems if you try to redo things to the factory setup?
So, I don't want to have to do anything like this if we can avoid this, plus this would be too much for me to do on my own, my brother-in-law would have to do this.
Plus anything we do to my computer will affect my mom's since this is how things our setup with ours linked together. So, any settings changed will affect her stuff, all her accounts. Since the router and modem are setup on mine and go out to hers.

Thank you for all the help.