its is very easy to stick with 11.10 and reinstall with a USB stick. There are many options here but my personal favourite is installing 11.10 to your USB drive using UNetbootin (free and easily available) make sure you mark it as executable and have 7zip installed.
All you need to do then is give download the 11.10 .iso from ubuntu.com and point UNetbootin to that .iso and install. Voila, now you can reinstall 11.10
**make sure you backup all your files. If you want to, I would recommend making the new partitions yourself so you can install your /home directory to a different partition to your '/' directory. That way, in future you won't need to wipe your files away when you reinstall.