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System Restore can bring back the meat of the system as it was before executables, drivers, and other system files (such as the Windows Registry) were corrupted. It can restore the system to a state before an .exe, .dll, or the like was installed—that's System Restore's reason to live. The disadvantage is that the restore is selectable by date, not by program. If you install one program called Nasty, and then one called Nice, and nice.exe isn't hidden from System Restore, when you roll back before installation of nasty.exe you'll lose nice.exe as well.
In most cases, assume that you'll need to reinstall your whole Nice program from scratch, but a few programs can be copied whole in their directories, pasted to a backup medium, and copied back without reinstalling. A little experimentation can yield time-saving rewards, should you find yourself frequently facing this kind of cleanup operation on user machines.
When System Restore does remove nice.exe, it probably won't remove the Nice program completely. Since System Restore's focus is on removing potentially threatening system files, it doesn't bother to clean up all the folders and innocuous program files (or data files created by the program, unless they're unfortunately named with extensions like those of protected files). You'll have to run Control Panels' familiar Add or Remove Programs feature to clean up after the System Restore party, or reinstall the program over remaining files (if that's appropriate) to preserve user settings.
