I admit it, I blew it on the journalling point. And you're right on the money about defragmenting. Here's a point another poster made to me: if your drives are IDE and not SATA, the journalling in NTFS might not always recover after a crash, which explains what happened to the PCs in my office (corrupted registries, etc). That's interesting, isn't it? That the drive type might affect the outcome?

I learn something every day here.

Amusing timing. I got an email yesterday that said a document I forwarded was "defiantly helpful". That complement I'll keep.