Mike, That happened to me before too. To prevent losing anything else in the future, I installed two hard drives and now ALL data goes to the second hard drive - the one without the operating system. The periodically I burn it to CD. Now when the computer goes a tad haywire and doesn't want to boot I just reformat and I know that all of my data is safe. Normally I would suggest partitioning your hard drive and have your data on the D: drive - but since you have those "crappy restore disks" it probably wouldn't work anyway. A second drive, that's the way to go! Good Luck! I know how you feel!!