Heh. Yeah, 'Grief'is a good, subtle word.... :P If you do a setup on a laptop, and you use lots of seperate drives (and it runs Windows) on your non portable units, you might want to look into a copy of Partition Magic. I've used this during the last 3 rebuilds of my main system to fix the drive letter assignments when I've had to wait until Win2k was installed to load drivers for part of my hard drive cluster (don't use raid yet...just a lot of drives, with critical stuff mirrored across two physical drives), or the smart media reader and CD-R and DVD burners decided they want certain letters. Partition Magic runs as a Win native app, and lets you create partitions, add or subtract from them, and reassign drive letter designations. It's been an invaluable tool when I've upgraded; I just keep a cheat sheet of what my major apps are, and which virtual drives they are on. If I have to migrate the drive, I know what the former idenitification was, and can make sure the drive identity matches (with a Poser runtime pushing 30 gigs of content, this is not a convienence. It's a neccessity and a lifesaver). The app (or the Mac equivalent) would make it easy to create new partitions and assign the correct drive letter to it. I learned long ago that the best thing is to have lots of discrete hard drives, and install nothing on C: except the OS and things like codecs that =have= to be there. Internet apps go on a seperate drive (which in itself defeats about half of the script kiddie nonsense, as it assumes it will be in C: with direct access to the root through something like Outlook). And if the OS faw down go boom, at least my data is still safe. I quit counting the number of people I had to explain that by using the default, when Windows blew, it took their pictures and letters with it... Oh! If you are going to be using Windows in your renderboxes, then head over to litepc.com, the home of 98lite and 2kXPlite. This is a utility that is so worth the minimal cost for Windows users. The guy who created it, Shane Brooks, did so in rejection of IE and the MS claims that it couldn't be removed without breaking the OS. They Lie. 2kXPlite has about 150+ features and apps that you can remove from the named OS, with a corresponding decrease in the OS memory footprint. For a renderbox you don't need things like IE, Outlook, Java, the Windows scripting host, games, Media Player, etc. The NT version runs as an application (where 98lite acts as an installer controller; you can get 98SE down to around 80megs of hard drive space if you wanted to), and give you an option to turn file protection on and off as you see fit. So you can make anything you don't need go away, and get rid of the cache files that XP and 2k hide to re-install that anything. My garden boxes are pretty stripped down, and run without a hitch. For XP this is a real gain, and it lets you strip all the dancing puppies and talking paperclips out of the system and saving that memory for something more important.