well here's the final update {taps playing in the background, softly} finally got her into the restore panel and after a couple of attempts to restore to a previous date i decided to just bite the bullet and try the restore to original setup option. Well things were looking pretty good as the program started to do it's thing and then it froze, and a nice error message popped up advising me that this wasn't going to happen, i gave my old buddies at dell a call and they hooked me up with a restore disk for 10.99 plus shipping, this i can live with. thanks for all the help and sympathy i appreciated it.