Can I reinstall Win7 without loosing all my settings?

[anken]

Hi, I got a new laptop with Win7. Everything seems to be working well, except Microsoft Street & Trips and Encarta. When I install from CD, I never get to the point where to enter the product key. Those programs work well on my husbands Win7 PC.
For me, I get the message that everything has installed well. When I try to open those programs, I get the message that the settings for this app. were not copied correctly and to run setup again for the location were it was originally installed. I guess that's the CD... Have done it a number of times.
My only guess is that Win7 was not installed completely. My question:

Can I reinstall the Win7 over the existing copy without losing all of my setting & programs?

I have tried so many different things to fix it but nothing has helped.
Also, I have noticed when installing Streets& Trips on my husbands PC, it briefly showed that it installed "Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable 10.0.303
Found this file on MS Website and downloaded & installed it. Now it's located in the Add/Remove Section along with a number of other C++ files.
There seems to be no way of inserting it to those programs and I don't know if this is the problem. I'm sorry to be so long winded....
If anybody has any suggestions/ ideas, I would appreciate it very, very much!!

[AnnMarie]

It's more likely to be an issue with your User Account rather than your Windows installation anken. See here for some suggestions.

[anken]

Thank you AnnMarie. I have tried that before but the choice to run as " Administrator" or "Separate memory space" is greyed out and I'm unable to change it. Have also gone to User Account in Control Panel and tried both ways without success.
I'm beginning to think that there is something wrong with this window installation..Hopefully it's not a hardware problem..
Is there a way to reinstall win7 over the existing copy and hopefully get all the files for a trouble free windows7.

[AnnMarie]

So just to clarify, you created a new user account with Admin permissions, logged into it and tried installing Street & Trips from there but got the same error message?

Is this your own laptop anken or a business machine?