I think I'm happy. Not quite sure yet. I finally gave in and reformatted my hard drive. It's just been giving me too much trouble. It took me this long because I'd backed it all up to an external hard drive and dumping all my music to that same drive seemed to help for a little while. But then I still kept having problems.
So I reformatted tonight after a number of frustrations, and I've spent the evening reinstalling applications. So, the thing that makes me happy is that all my MSN favorites really were stored on the mainframe. I still haven't restored all the emails, but I think it'll be recoverable, which means I can still access both emails and favorites till I can get them moved over manually (ug). It's a happier thought than having lost them.
Another happy thought is that now that reconnecting through MSN Premium even for a little while allows me to reinstall my McAfee Virus Scan and Firewall for free. They come with the MSN subscription through Verizon. Free virus protection is a very happy thing.