A few days ago I removed a piece of spyware from my computer. The information I found on the spyware warned me that if I didn't run a particular program to remove the spyware it could damage my network. I downloaded and executed the program to remove the spyware. It seemed to work fine and my network was still working so I didn't think much of it. Well a couple of days later I noticed a problem, apparently the program still damaged my network because for some reason I am unable to view my workgroup. I can still access files from my networked computers just fine but if I double-click on the view workgroup icon it comes up with a message saying that my explorer.exe file encountered problems and needs to close.
 
A minor annoyance really or so I thought, Until I tried to run a game City of Heroes. For some reason the Cohupdater.exe file also runs into a problem and has to close. This is my backup computer so it is sharing the internet connection from my primary computer. I am hoping that perhaps these two issues are caused by a simple corrupted file but don't really know enough about networks to pinpoint what file could cause explorer to crash when viewing the workgroup and whether or not that file is also used when running the patch program from Coh.
 
Unfortunately my first thought to fix the problem was just to do a windows repair. Then I redownloaded all the windows updates and the problem was still there. I didn't realize that by doing a windows repair it would destroy my restore points thus killing my best chance to actually fix the problem. Any ideas would be appreciated. I would prefer to avoid reformatting but if necessary I can.