the king is dead

Something is wrong with my computer at home. We used Zone Alarm firewall but it wasn't working right, so I switched to Zone Alarm Pro's trial version. Well that ran out so I tried to go back to the regular (free) version but I couldn't get it to work. So, I downloaded another free firewall (Sygate) and installed it. It told me to reboot to finish installation so I did. It then rebooted itself over and over again. I couldn't figure out how to get it to stop. I tried renaming the executables and other files that I thought would be the problem, but it still would just boot over and over again. It did not work anymore. So I copied all the files from the c drive to my other drive and reinstalled windows xp over the other version to see if that would clean it up. It cleaned it, sorta, but I cannot connect to the internet right now. That is a problem. So...I guess my next step is to format the drive and do a clean installation of XP. I can't think of anything else to do. I have no idea why my internet connection isn't working. I tried it through my router and with no router, but got the same results. Sometimes computers frustrate me.