Can't restore Preferences

I am running Mac OS X 10.6.8 on an iMac and recently added Time Capsule a couple months ago. Everything had been running VERY smoothly on my iMac for over a year. About a week ago I noticed that I was getting a lot of unresponsiveness / delays and the "spinning wheel." At one point, my Parallels desktop started getting unresponsive and then the entire system. I was not able to shut down no matter what I did - Force Quitting applications etc. - first time that's ever happened. Used the only option available to me at that point - powered down then back up. When I powered back up, my application menu - which is usually docked at the bottom - disappeared. Went into system preferences, made sure the right options were selected - no luck. The only way I could run an application was to do a "Go" in Finder.
Did some online research and information seemed to be pointing to a corrupted "Preferences" folder in Library.  Aha! First chance to use Time Machine to save the day.
Went into Time Machine, selected the Preferences folder from about 9 days ago and then selected Restore. It said that it was preparing to copy 6,955 items but before it apparently started copying, I received the pop-up error:
You can't copy "Preferences" because it has the same name as another item on the destination volume, and that volume doesn't distinguish between upper- and lowercase letters in filenames.
Went into the Disk Utility and sure enough, Time Capsule is case sensitive, journaled; my HD is just journaled (so apparently case insensitive.)
If the data came from my HD in the first place and that is where it is going back - I can't imagine that this is a real problem... and nevertheless I am stuck with a system limping along and no apparent way to do a restore of Preferences - which is the whole reason I acquired Time Capsule.  Any suggestions?

You are amazing! Thank you VERY much!!!
As you suggested, I went into list view. Out of the roughly 7,000 items in the folder, I successfully copied everything in the ~/Library/Preferences folder from 9 days ago with just a few exceptions:
1. It would not let me copy the "ByHost" folder - said I had no permission.
2. I didn't copy the Parallels preferences since I uninstalled the application anyway.
3. There were two very suspect files.  They both started with the prefix ".chc" followed by about 30 digits.  One file ended in ".1" and the other file ended in ".1.plist"  I did not even try to copy either of those.  Reading some other background stuff, I wonder if the case sensitive problem had something to do with not ejecting a device properly like a camera card or something like that.  In any case, it became part of the backup and is PROBABLY the item(s) that prevented me from doing the restore.
I don't know what trashed my Preferences folder in the first place other than I installed an auto-downloaded Parallels update about the same time the problems started... and then the hard power-off which I hate to do.
Needless to say, when I rebooted my iMac, EVERYTHING came up properly including the app bar, startup applications, Mac Outlook etc.  All the application preferences look fine.
Thanks again and I hope someone else can learn from this thread too!
Doug

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