XP makes automatic restore points. Each time you install a 'designed for XP' program it will make a system restore point for you, and it also does one on its own every couple of days or so.
Doing a system restore will roll back any .EXE's and .DLL's that have been installed/replaced since the restore point, and also roll back changes to the registry since that date.
Email, documents and data won't be affected, only installed programs.
In my book, system restore is pretty much the only real advantage that XP has over Windows 2000.
(Can be really useful to clean out spyware and such too if you know you got infected with something... There's almost no way it can survive a system restore)
Doing a system restore will roll back any .EXE's and .DLL's that have been installed/replaced since the restore point, and also roll back changes to the registry since that date.
Email, documents and data won't be affected, only installed programs.
In my book, system restore is pretty much the only real advantage that XP has over Windows 2000.
(Can be really useful to clean out spyware and such too if you know you got infected with something... There's almost no way it can survive a system restore)