I know How you feel, my friend. I have two things that I rely on and have gotten me out of some very sticky situations. The first is a 300GB Maxtor USB2 Hard drive and the second is Norton Ghost (2004 I think). With Norton Ghost, I create a ghost backup (an exact copy of my system including Windows itself, Ghost runs in DOS so Windows is also backed up) of both my C and D drive, which is saved directly to my 300Gb Maxtor. I try to do this once a month. The cool thing with Norton Ghost, is the fact that I can then totally format both my C and D drive, install Windows, install ghost and nothing else. I then only have to run Ghost and tell it to reload the backup I created... It asks me if I wish to overwrite windows, I click yes because I really cant be bothered to reinstall all my windows updates and programs, then sit back and watch it do its magic. About an hour later (my backup is about 50Gb in size) Windows, my Apps and even my desktop image are back to where they were when I created the backup. You might want to consider this route as the time saved is considerable compared to all the downloading and installing you have to do now. (I am talking hours if not days worth of saved time) I got burned too many time and I wont let it happen again... Take care, my friend... Gareth:)