My old Dell with my FS9 and everything was lost due to a physical malfunction of the hard drive. What a major bummer, everything is GONE, totally gone!

But I have a problem with my brand new, home built computer. XP Home AMD 64 Dual Core, 1 gig ram, Nvidia 1600 512 ram, 2 160 Gig mirroring hard drive.
All of my folders have the little box checked under propriorties that says read only and I can't uncheck it. When I do it just goes back to being checked.
Now this is raising hell with a bunch of my programs that need to have access to files that are in these folders. Like for example, FSX can't write to the cfg. file so it won't run properly. There are some programs that won't run at all, and I pretty sure that this is the problem!?
There is no password set and no other log on names besides mine (Marlin)
Can somebody help me out over here, I'm just not getting what is going on.