Open Office has an excellent RESTORE feature that has saved my bacon countless times. It has a wee bit o' a learning curve but it's fairly intuitive and will open M$ Word documents, Excel Spreadsheets, .pdf files, etc. Since it's open source, it's free and constantly being improved upon.

I had problems with M$ Media Player crashing until I downloaded the free version of MediaMonkey (qv) and haven't had a crash since. No more: "Windows Media Player has stopped working..." errors and MM has several cool features that I haven't found in WMP.