Good news; I was able to get windows to work again without killing anything.
Bad news; I had to disconnect one of the hard drives for windows to be happy again.
Now, there isn't anything actually wrong with that hard drive, it's just that windows doesn't want me to be able to use it for some reason (this is the same hard drive that windows had beef with last time). That being said I found out that the shadows problem wasn't actually from the code but rather from how I exported the character. That would normally be an easy thing to replace but 3dsmax needs to be reinstalled and the installer in on that disconnected hard drive, lucky me. So I'll try to do that later (I don't want windows to crash for at least a few more hours). I think I have the chat box under control again, so I'll work on the Voip and the sinking issues. Until next time.
-Mark