well first of all how exactly did she "remove" IE8? you can not actually remove IE from windows, you remove IE8 from add remove programs it then rolls the pc back to the earlier version of IE that was built in. Now if she had IE7 orIE8 on the pc then got service pack 3 for xp you can not go back. It was well documented in the directions for service pack 3. You cannot uninstall Internet Explorer 7 or Internet Explorer 8 after you install Windows XP Service Pack 3 What service pack is she on with her xp on that pc? I think before anything can be done she would have to explain exactly what her "removal" process was and what did she actually remove? Has she tried doing a system restore to the point prior to making any of those changes? that would be number one on the list to try. Second would be installing IE8 again, these things may need to be done in safe mode with networking. I would also highly recommend running malwarebytes on it before going much farther because many of these errors are caused by an infection. How to download and install Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware application for Windows computers by the way on the directions given above by katheria a portion of the directions did not appear in the post it is likely due to the brackets which this site will not post properly but here is a link with the full instructions should they be needed. Windows can't find Rundll32.exe

You may have a borken EXE file association problem, probably from the Malware. The computer should be taken to a malware removal forum for further analysis. Broken EXE associations will show up in more thorough scans used by those forums. In the mean time here's a link for fixing the EXE association issue in Vista. You may need to download it onto a flash drive, just click the EXE in the box provided on the web page the link below takes you to... Good luck. Here is a link that might be useful: File-association-fixes-for-Windows

I would download the itunes installer from Apple and run it without uninstalling. It should recognize that there is an existing installation and do a repair or something along those lines. But I would install with the installer rather than just trying the new updates. It could be that the files you're missing are files that aren't used all the time.

Forget all about Firefox and Internet Explorer for the time being because you aren't going to use them for this. Open Windows Explorer and find these rar files that you want to open. Then right click on the first one e.g. "yourfilename".rar. Point to 7-Zip in the drop down menu and click on "Extract to yourfilename". (I always use the same "folder name" as the "filename" so that I can easily see what has been extracted.) A new folder called "Yourfilename" is created in the same place that you are already looking so you don't have to search for it. Inside this new folder will be the files that were originally stored inside the rar file. Any quantity and type of file can be stored inside a rar file (they are just a convienient way of quickly sending lots of files in one go) e.g. bmp or jpg photos, an exe programme file, a doc Word file, etc. Once you have extracted the file just use it in the normal way - you may want to move it to a more convienient folder later e.g. My Photos. One other thing worth mentioning is to check the files with you antivirus programme before you run them in case the sender's computer was infected. Colin