What to do if Adminstrative Tools fail.

I am unable to do a system restore. The wizard crashes
without giving an error message (and it gets reported to
microsoft. Microsoft says I should get the latest windows
update, which I already have installed.) When I go to
administrative tools and select services and
applications, to try to fix it, it just hangs and
reports "program not responding", again no error message
is generated. I could find nothing in the knowledge base
that addresses what to do when administrative tools
fail. And yes, I used the CD to check and restore any
system files that may have been corrupted. This did not
help. Can I be the very first person to ever encounter
administrative tools failures? How lucky can I be?