Yeah, there are certain approved NAS devices that it will work with. I know LaCie makes one, but on the whole it doesn't play well. I've got local Time Machine drives on my studio iMac, office iMac, and workshop iMac. I'm not running Time Machine on my laptop at the moment, but I don't really save anything locally on this machine so I don't see the need. At worst I'd lose a little time reconfiguring software. I tend to keep things close to the default settings when possible since I'm hopping between machines a lot and tend to replace my laptop every 12-18 months.

Le sigh. Reinstalling IrfanView didn't fix the problem.

And now Spybot seems to be stuck in an infinite loop trying to get rid of WildTangent. Okay, I shut it off.

But fuck. I have no idea what's going on, and I don't want to deal with a Windows reinstall right now. I wonder if I can even find my XP discs. And Office. But it looks like that may be the only option?

Have you tried going back to a restore point before all this started, P-C? Outlook Express is part of Explorer, so you could try upgrading Explorer. Then you could try a repair reinstall on Office, since that's common to a couple of your problems. My troubleshooting philosophy is backup your data, set a restore point and then throw things at it and see what sticks.

Why do all those dll files lose their tiny little minds or wander off?

I adore my NAS. Just for the record. It is so freaking easy and fast.

The only thing I think is wonky about it is that the automatic backup seems to believe that if I delete something, it should delete it too, which I find to be odd behavior for backup software. But other than that, it's lovely to be able to just walk into the house with my laptop and have it start firing off to the box whatever I'd been working on.

I've got a 2 TB NAS on my network right now, but I'm actually looking at installing MacOS server and going to a 20 mbit downstream 2mbit upstream static IP connection so that I can have a more robust network server, iCal server, and move some of my mail and hosting services in house.

Yeah, mine is 2TB, too, but I'm running it mirrored, so I only actually have 1TB of space.

I haven't done much in the way of server functionality; it's really just dead storage space right now. Although I am streaming the Napster tracks off it to the house sound system.

And my actual connection to the rest of the world is still tenuous with the cellular modem, so I couldn't do hosting stuff, much as I'd prefer to.

Seeing as how I can't get them to lay cable out to me, or for that matter pots, I don't suppose I'll be able to convince someone to lay fiber or even just anything dedicated. Hee. Yay, rural life.

I have an external hard drive that I sometimes remember to plug in and Chronosync important things.

...

I should possibly develop a more robust system, but I don't really have that many critical files, other than school stuff which tends to live on a flash drive anyway.

Yeah, I'm 2 TB mirrored, so would be 4 GB of space otherwise.

So I think I have a virus, but neither AVG nor Malwarebytes find anything fishy with my system.

Crap.

I ran System File Check, and it identified four or five DLLs that needed replacing, but I don't have a Windows XP disc to feed it. Windows came installed on my computer, but I didn't get the discs, I don't think. I can't find them.

I'm going to try System Restore, but I don't think that's ever worked for me. In the past, it always tries and says that it was unable to take me back to the Restore point. I did notice, however, that a Windows Update came in Sunday night, and the first time I noticed the problem was Monday night. And I am fairly certain that I was able to open a file from My Recent Documents on Sunday morning. So I don't know if a Windows Update could actually be responsible, but it's a strange coincidence.