Vista - Help Vista boots to windows98 startup selection screen?

Let me start off by saying thanks for any help. I used a friends computer to download and burn an image file to disk. In the course of doing so i had to download and install a img burner(i think it was called ISOBURN) which i then uninstalled. Sometime later that day the system was rebooted and now the system no longer boots normally, it boots to a WINDOWS98 startup selection. If i try and select any of the options from this menu it returns that it "cannot find himem.sys...blahblah...please enter the path to command.com.
I have already restored the registry to an earlier backup and rolled back the entire system 2 weeks using the OEM restore disk niether of which corrected the issue. Any assistance will be truly appreciated.

I suspect the image file itself...

The image was linux mint from the offical website so i doubt it.

So the folks at CH weren't able to help ? ? ?

Problem resolved. Thanks CH.

Hi woops,

In order to provide closure to this thread, and for it to make sense, can you please explain what you did to solve your problem and who, exactly, is/are CH?

I'm very sorry I have not interacted on forums very much. I thought i had a solution from another site "CH" but it didn't work out.
My plan was to remove data from the pc and then do a complete system restore. I was able to move the data i needed by entering the command prompt in the pre-environment that the manufacturer's restore disk provided but was unable to complete a factory restore b/c i recieved a error message that System Restore was unable to find a windows volume on the disk??? It had provided me with the option to reinstall TO the recovery partition or the main partition.I tried the main partition but that is when i recieved the error message.I was too scared to try the recovery partition.Any advice would be very appreciated. Once again im very sorry for not providing a logical conclusion to the thread I'm a newb.