[HELP!] Windows Installer & System Restore both won't work (Windows Vista 64)

I'll try to make this short, because I have no idea what to do anymore and I need to go to bed. I'm backlogged on sleep as it is...

I've recently been trying to get a utility that can backup my drive as a disk image, seeing as my motherboard recently got fried by a power surge.

After trying Norton Ghost 14 for awhile, I couldn't get it to work properly... through several installs and uninstalls.

So I found another backup utility and downloaded it.

At this point after trying many times both to uninstall Ghost 14 a final time and to install the new backup utility, I couldn't install or uninstall ANYTHING. Either way I always get the same thing: Something starts "installing", but it will just freeze forever at the start of the progress bar. If I try to cancel whatever it is, the window hangs there and can't be closed.

So I try to start system restore... nothing comes up. I see the process starting/started, but nothing ever actually comes up. If I try to start it again, I just get a message that says "this service is started already."

Stuff I've tried:
*Installing windows installer 4.5... predictably enough, this requires a working windows installer in the first place.
*Manually starting and/or setting the windows installer service to automatic.
*Re-registering windows installer through command prompt.