I'm pretty sure I was the cause of my own problem. Thursday night I decided to uninstall a lot of old programs I don't use anymore. I'm guessing one (or more) of the uninstalls deleted some files used by programs I wanted to keep using. But I didn't think about that until later. Friday morning some programs I use everyday wouldn't run.
I spent half of Friday trying to fix it but couldn't. I'm pretty sure that at least some of my "fixes" made the problem worse because the system became increasingly unstable. That's when it dawned on me that all those uninstalls was the likely root cause of my problem. Had I thought of that sooner the "fix" would likely have been simpler and faster. But that's not the way it went down.
The good news is I have a Network Attached Server that backs up all our computers daily so I could just restore close to the point before my adventures in uninstalling without losing anything of importance.
When I went to restore from backup the whole process came to a screeching halt because of missing network drivers. This was particularly annoying since I had the drivers right there on a flash drive. The restore program wouldn't load them.
After a lot of swearing and desperate attempts to work around the problem I finally resorted to searching the web for help. Turns out that my program that restores from backup is a 32 bit program. It has 32-bit and 64-bit drivers for everything except network stuff. I'm running a 64-bit system and 32-bit network drivers won't work. So I had to go track down 64-bit network drivers that would work with my system. Once I had those the backup proceeded just fine. My system was restored about 2:00am Saturday morning.
You can bet I'm already tracking down 64-bit drivers for all my other systems. Hopefully I'll never need them, but.......
It's funny both of our systems had problems at the same time. I wonder if someone north of Jacsonville is sticking pins in voodoo dolls to punish us for living where the sun shines and the snow doesn't (snow that is).
Ed
