I Did A Stupid, Stupid Thing.

I read a newspaper story on 5 ways to remove unwanted files from your computer, and I downloaded one called "ccleaner", and it promptly reeked havoc on my whole computer. I have a 20" iMac, purchased in January, 2007 running on Snow Leopard.

A few hours after downloading ccleaner, I kept getting the spinning beach ball of death, and my computer ran extremely slow. It took 5 to 10 minutes to simply open up a photo, or go to another page. I also discovered that ccleaner wiped out a number of my documents and other important files. The one smart thing that I did do was to have almost everything important on my computer backed up somewhere else.

I moved ccleaner into the trash and reinstalled Snow Leopard. Everything ran fast and smoothly like it had before, for 6 days. Then yesterday, I started to get the spinning beach ball of death again, and everything slowed down just like before, like ccleaner was still reeking havoc. I shut down the computer and restarted it. Now it only goes to the grey page with the apple logo and the spinning time circle beneath it, and it won't advance to the login page. I tried unplugging the power cord and restarting. I tried holding down the command, option, p and r keys when restarting. Now, I get the grey apple screen, and below the spinning time circle is a progress bar. The bar fills up about 10%, then stops, then it goes away and another progress bar shows up, fills up about 10%, stops, and then the iMac shuts off. I did install the startup disk and was able to run a short and a long hardware test, and both times it said that no hardware problems were detected.

I would like to try and reinstall Snow Leopard again, but I need to get beyond the grey apple screen (don't I?). Is there anything else I can try? Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks for your help.

<Edited by Host>