I did the unforgiveable. I got too big for my britches and removed 4 files from the registry on my other computer without backing it up. IE is totally gone and the boot CD ROM won't work. I've reinstalled Windows from that CD ROM several times with the most recent being last month as I've been dealing with major viruses (kids computer). Sadly, I was down to deleting the last few bits of infected files and I would have had a clean computer. Can you say doofus?

This is what I deleted:
HKLM\\Software\\CLASSES\\exefile
HKLM\\Software\\CLASSES\\comfile
HKLM\\Software\\CLASSES\\piffile
HKLM\\Software\\CLASSES\\htafile

Should I start digging a hole in my backyard to bury it or is there anything I can do now?

Is this 98 or ME? If so try booting to the screen where you would pick Safe Mode and instead pick Command Prompt Only. When you get to the prompt type in:

scanreg /restore

Pick a recent backup of the the registry that says "Started", and only pick the most recent one or the rest of the backups will be unavailable to you in future.

Another option might be:

scanreg /fix

to fix the registry but I'm not sure that would work in this case although it wouldn't hurt to try. If you do a restore your virus related entries will be restored also.

System restored easily when I did what you said. Thank you so much!