error loading user.exe reinstall windows

I ran sfc on a system running W98 SE. I got a message that user.exe is corrupted and that I should restore it. I tried to restore it from the W98 disk but it could not find it. I made sure it was looking in the right location. Then I thought if I went to dos and deleted user.exe and then copied it from my system to the windows\system directory the it would boot, it did not. I tried to do scanreg \restore and that did not work. Any way to correct this without reinstalling windows.