HELP! COMPUTER CRASHED. WANT TO RETRIEVE MY FILES

Hey guys, I'm not sure what happened. But Sunday night after my garden party, I loaded all the pics from my digital camera onto the computer. Mon morning the computer was all screwed up! I know the memory was running low, so it's possible I overloaded it with these pics fo the garden party.

I finally worked with the pc long enough to get it back online, altho my network connections says there are no connections available. At first I couldn't check yahoo email, would get a blank page that said "DONE". Now today I can get into my email but I can't delete any of it or print it. I can't copy and paste anything anywhere.

I really want to reformat the hard drive and just start all over. But when I try to copy my pictures and documents to CD, I get an error message that says the stub received bad data. I know my CD RW's are good. They're brand new. But I've tried several of them and none work. I have 100's of photos from this spring alone, along with the garden party photos. I can't do a restore to a backed up date because I'd lose my garden party pictures.

I ran a virus scan and I don't have a virus. I do have some adware that I can't delete. It's ADW Ruledor.C in my yahoo messenger. How can I get rid of it?

What can I do? How can I save my pics and documents before I reformat? Any help is appreciated!

NancyAnn