oh! that's awesome. thanks tommy!

Google is the new Microsoft?

For years, Silicon Valley hungered for a company mighty enough to best Microsoft. Now it has one such contender: the phenomenally successful Google.

But instead of embracing Google as one of their own, many in Silicon Valley are skittish about its size and power. They fret that the very strengths that made Google a search-engine phenomenon are distancing it from the entrepreneurial culture that produced it - and even transforming it into a threat.

Well, fuck.

My computer is crapping out on boot up again. I hadn't had a chance to do more than run some disk clean up and defrag stuff on the drive the last time I recovered it, as I have been quite busy of late.

Now, when I boot up off the CD and run chkdsk, it's telling me the volume appears to contain one or more unrecoverable problems.

I'm not really worried about getting my files off the disk, but I'm beginning to worry that my computer may be done for.

Yup. The volume appears to contain one or more unrecoverable errors.

AAARGH!

Okay, on the thirda attempt last night, chkdsk ran all the way through and seemed to work. However, now on boot up, when Windows tries to start loading, some dll tries to pass an invalid parameter to something.

So, I tried to boot up from the CD to the repair console, except now it asks me which of the ONE Windows systems I would like to log in to. When I select the one it lists (by pressing "1" and hitting ENTER), it asks me for an ADMIN password (which I have never used), and I don't have one. Three wrong guesses and it forces a restart of the machine.

Anybody have a help on this one? "admin" and "administrator," or "(nothing)" are the only default passwords I remember, and none of those work.

However, now on boot up, when Windows tries to start loading, some dll tries to pass an invalid parameter to something.

Ummm...this sounds scarily similar to what happened to my aunt last week. We think she got hit by a Sasser worm variant. The boot process would hang with a message window titled "lsass.exe system error" (that's a small case L, not an upper case I) that said a process was trying to pass an invalid parameter.

eta: a better description of the error message box

Oh crap. That's exactly what's happening, dcp. Is there any way to recover this drive now?

I only have the story second hand, so I don't have all the details. If you can no longer boot off the CD, you probably can't get to the point where you can use Symantec's removal and fix tools. That's what happened to my aunt. She ended up pulling the hard drive, taking it to her son-in-law and installing it as a 2nd drive on his machine, copying what data files she could to CD, then re-formatting the hard drive, re-installing it in her own machine, and re-installing Windows and all her software and data files from scratch.

Before you go that far, keep researching. Perhaps the hivemind has other ideas to try?

Afterwards, get all your patches up to date, and then have a look at Steve Gibson's web site. I like the "ShieldsUP!" and "Leak Test" utilities.

Hi--

Here am I with my daily Access question:

Is it possible to create an empty duplicate of a database. Currently, every class has a database, and, while I'd like to eventually make one registration database, right now I would like to not seem like I am changing everything.

In Filemaker, I could save a "clone, no records" copy of the database. It appears there is no good way to do this in Access. I would prefer not to build 35 identical databases.

Create a new database. Import all the tables from the existing database, but tell Access to import the table design only. (Also, import any queries, reports, forms, etc.)