os: Windows Vista Home Premium
browser: firefox 3.5.16
Problem has been going on for a while now. My fiance got one of the pretend virus protection viruses. (I honestly can't remember the name.) We eventually got it out following the instructions to wipe the virus online. I really don't remember the steps exactly anymore. I just remember transferring the programs we needed via a flash drive and running them under safe mode.

The problem is that now he can't run certain things that connect to the internet. His browsers work, but the downloaded versions of aim, msn, yahoo, and our substiuting program, Jobulator, don't work and some other programs. We've tried uninstalling and reinstalling and running under admin mode. None of that works. Another issue is that he's unable to update anything. Firefox can't update, and neither can Vista. He's been able to get the downloads themselves, but they refuse to install.

Do we need to do a recovery, or can we fix this? I'm not sure if he even has vista recovery disks.

I've got a western digital scorpio hard drive in my laptop, and am pretty sure there's something up with the drive. Linux won't boot, and the very odd error messages all seem to be related to the hard drive. Windows boots, but BSODs every so often. I'd like a boot disc to run diagnostics off, because I really have no faith in windows to do anything right, and if the problem is some weird virus or something, I want the testing medium to be clean.
So, what is a really good boot disc to run drive diagnostics and possibly antivirus from? BartPE?