Sounds to me like you need to set your screen resolution and colors back up. If you have a 17" monitor, go to 800x600. If you have really good eyes, go to 1024x768. Depending on your video card, you should be able to handle 16 million colors or more. This is all accessible by right-clicking on your desktop and selecting "Properties", then clicking the "Settings" tab on the right.
right click on the desktop, and click on properties, then settings. Adjust the settings for color and screen area. If you can't adjust them beyond 256 colors and 640 by 480, then you don't have the proper video card drivers; if you can adjust them, you should be able to get by to the display settings you once had.
Thanks keeley, it worked perfectly. Now that I have reformatted and set everything back my computer runs a lot better and reformatting was a lot simpler than I thought it would be.
