Hi Tom. I usually end up doing what you're doing once a year.

Until I get the wireless router from horizon, my wife's machine is the only one on-line.

Somehow her hard drive, which I installed, went tits up without warning after a few months. [Seagate 40 7200] She got a message saying OS not found. I haven't seen that one before and didn't have time to dig so I had her send it to a local shop. Long story short, It came back with the secondary IDE cable unplugged from the mother board so she got a "disk read error" when she tried to install XP. After I plugged the cable in, I went to install XP and got a warning that the primary partition already contained an operating system. I was furious. Luckily for the guys at the shop, I couldn't make it in for a few days. They clamed the hard drive was new - strait from the shrink wrap, didn't know why I was getting the message and half-hartedly apologized for not plugging the cable in.

One thing I'm having my wife do is put all the driver software in one place when she's done loading them. When you reinstall your sysem it's nice to have all the drivers handy.

Sometimes computers can be such a pain in the ass.

RobVG