Windows 7 Visa OS is broken - can I do a clean install of 7 anyway?

I hope I'm posting in the right forum - I'll just apologize in advance for my lack of technical....anything.

I have a Gateway desktop that's a couple of years old now and it's running Vista. It was preloaded, so I have no idea what version of Vista - I've never had any reason to check but I assume it's the basic home version. Anyway, yesterday I was trying to print something, the system froze (it's always hated my printer driver) and the only thing I could do was a hard stop. <f1, 2, 8, and 10> options have all been tried to no avail. The system hangs at crcdisk.sys. I've done a considerable amount of forum scanning since it happened and have tried all the non-technical recommendations to no avail.

I'm one of the lucky ones, in that I started storing things outside years ago and have nothing of interest worth saving on my system - so I can dump any and everything.

My questions are:

1. If I purchase the Windows 7 Home Premium and do a 'clean' (I think that's the term everyone uses?) install...will I get my computer back? Again - I could care less about my files - as long as everything works, I'm good.
2. Or would I be better off to do an upgrade. Since my Vista doesn't want to work, could I even do an upgrade?
3. And how can I tell if I need 32-bit or 64-bit if I can't access my system to tell? Would bad things happen if I did the wrong one?

My goal here is just getting a working PC that'll accept all my drivers and cause me only minimal grief in the process of getting it up and running.

thanks in advance!