Takeown Changed Start Menu, Corrupted System Restore?

I recently ran into frustration trying to save or make new any files in the root C: directory, with Windows7 Home Premium being set by default, of course, to not allow this. I did a cursory skim of some information online about changing these settings, and made some changes a bit hastily. Specifically, for the C: drive I took ownership of every subdirectory and gave my account full permissions under security. Annoyingly, this didn't fix the original issue of saving to that drive (which I no longer care about anyway), and it caused (at least) two new problems. Now my start menu has far fewer listings than it used to have; I imagine some programs were listed in it based on the previous permissions. I tried to do a system recovery, both through the OS and with a recovery disc, and that does not work either. It lists restore points, but after restarting it says that the restore was unable to complete.Can I fix the permissions and ownership of just the restore directory and program components, enough to run one, and revert?Or, failing that, is there a way to undo recent ownership changes made? I poked around in the Event Viewer, but it's not laid out very clearly.It's ok if it's not possible or easy to do it this way; I can grab just my vital files and completely reinstall Windows if it's absolutely necessary, but it seems excessive. I doubt the system restore files are corrupted. More, let's say, confused.Let me know if you need any of the error message codes. Somehow they never seem useful. Screenshots forthcoming.