woe is me

My laptop is ailing. Now that I've got my sites set up, I need to turn my focus to getting my pc healthy. I've tried restore points... It all started when I tried to install a program that was extremely large. I uninstalled it, but didn't realize the extent of the problems until after some time passed and that restore point was deleted. Of course, I can't say for certain that was the cause of all this, but I thought the restore points went farther back. So now my mail hangs up almost everytime I get on and the sync program flat doesn't work, despite reinstalling it more than once. My money program quits running in the background frequently for no reason. Just stuff like that. I hate to go back to square one and reload everything. But I can't seem to find the reason for the glitches. Any ideas would be welcome.