Did a clean install and it didn't help. It was a good plan and I wish it would have worked; so is there any other suggestions?
I can suggest to you that you continue to use Windows 7 and look into the problem areas you are having. Specifically, you've lost your stuff. May I recommend
Dropbox.com, an online backup solution for your problems? You can backup important documents and files. It is a folder that resides in your Documents called "Dropbox". They offer 2GB of free storage on the Amazon Elastic Cloud. No catch. They just want you to bite and buy their premium service for extra storage. This is like having a USB flash drive and being able to use it on multiple computers at the same time. Its great for synchronizing work between computers, but also for backup reasons. You don't even have to have the application installed to get to your stuff; you can simply access their online website to initiate the downloads.
Furthermore, I would seriously recommend that you invest in a backup/imaging program for your computer. More recently, I would recommend Paragon backup for this purpose. It works quite well, uses the Windows pre-load environment for bare-metal restore and recovery. It can partition your local drive if you don't have a removable or external one to keep the backups in a safe partition. It uses the Microsoft volume shadow copy service first, and if that doesn't work, it uses its own copy service to do full backups while your machine is online. This is better than Dropbox since you can restore your entire system with a recovery CD, and its more reliable than the built in Windows Backup.
If can safely load all of your stuff, and invest just a little bit of time (and money) into backing up your stuff, I believe you will start to get used to Windows 7 and not feel as nervous about the learning curve. I refer people to Dropbox all the time because every time someone buys extra storage I get an additional .25GB of space or something, but its well worth it. I use it all the time for work. If you use Dropbox on multiple computers on your home network it will now access the LAN first to synchronize your files to save you and them bandwidth. It is a great solution for backing up documents, passwords, and software installers -- you name it. You could also try Carbonite for a full, online backup of the files on your system. But it won't let you restore the OS if it fails: just the files. So applications will get lost, but you'll still have the data. Its a paid solution that offers unlimited storage.
For the full image backup, go for Paragon. I have always thought its funny that gamers save their progress in a video game all their time, but never think about backup & recovery of their computer when it could contain so much important information. I hope for once my suggestions help you.