BleepingComputer.com: Used Recovery utility, now what?

Computer is an HP Pavilion a1650y and I know just enough about computers to make me dangerous.

I had been dealing with some ransomware issues that I am pretty confident were resolved. My lastest issue has now happened twice. I believe both times I had run a Norton AV scan and/or update and was then prompted to reboot. When booting up, it would get to the Windows boot screen, flash blue and then start to reboot again. It would continue with this cycle. Finally, I used the F10 recovery option after I could not get windows to boot at all (safe mode or otherwise). Recovery took my system back to the factory settings and created a new profile. My old documents were/are accessible by going to the c:/ drive, docs/settings and the old profile.

My issue now is with all the software I had installed. Its all still loaded in the program files, but none of it will start If trying to use the shortcuts, it says "only works for programs installed". If I go to the program file and try to start from there I get "program not installed for current user". I'm hoping there is some way to get the software to load properly without having to re-install. I would also like to remove all these excess profiles.

I've been trying to search and figure this out for several weeks and am about fed up. I'm getting very close to just re-formatting and starting over. However, I've been told by a couple people that it may be a hardware (motherboard to be exact) issue and I don't want to do anything if there is indeed a hardware issue. I've run hardware checks through the recovery software and everything seems to check out.

Any thoughts?

As far as I know there is no way to get around this issue other than reinstalling all the software. The problem is that although the files are there all the associated registry entries were deleted during the factory restore.