Photoshop help!

A friend recently purchased Photoshop 7 for me--I'm having trouble with it, though.

I installed it, started it up, it goes through the whole loading process, and then an error message pops up that says "Unable to continue because of a hardware or system error. Sorry, but this error is unrecoverable."

I was thinking of maybe reinstalling XP (because I think my brother deleted a plethora of system files)--but does anyone else have any other suggestions?

Thank you so much. (and I apologize if posts not pertaining to icons aren't allowed)