Why not just uninstall that dodgy Office install, and then install an alternative, like OpenOffice. It's a free, open source alternative to Office and can even open and edit Office files.

There are many ways to backup, but whatever you use, do it now. If you don't have any backups of your photos and other, 'can't be lost' files, what happens if your hard drive fails suddenly?

Drag and drop onto an external disk works for me too. I don't use image or back-up utilities, although I do have Acronis TrueImage, and that is very good software. But drag and drop is fine. Just remember, an external hard disk can fail just as easily as an internal, so the usual advice is, one backup copy is not enough. Two or three is recommended, to CD or DVD.

Firefox favorites can be exported to a file. Firefox add-ons cannot be backed up. Emails are more difficult, and depends on what email software you use. Any Address book can be backed up though.

Program files cannot be moved and restored later. In any fresh install, or recovery, all those 3rd party software applications you installed previously will be lost, and so you will have to install them again, either from the CD they came from, or by downloading the installation .exe files again.

Many people, myself included, save all those downloaded installation .exe files to a separate folder, (mine is called Downloaded files), and then backup that folder to some sort of external media.

We won't discuss P2P like bitTorrent here. Such software is too often used to download and share copyrighted files, and as that is Piracy, such discussions contravene Forum Policy.

I hope that helps.

Mark