connie, I like it.

Quickie in. I'm in hell; came home from day hiring lawyer to find a trashed computer. Shitload of program files apparently trashed and I CANNOT ACCESS MY FICTION. Pray for me. This is my career, my income and my life we're talking about.

A Jewish version of accidie? Whew.

juliana, there's a small amount of me in Amanada Lisle, but not too much. I lack her detachment.

deb, what OS/Programs are being problematic? (the tech thread might be able to help)

Ple, it's a corker. I came home and found a brand new shiny icon in one corner of the screen: a shortcut icon to Netscape, a hypertex doc (wot the FUCK?) The old shortcut - it was there when I left this morning - is now a white square. It's claiming it can't find any trace of of most of the ".exe" files, including win.exe, watch me have fucking bloody heart failure.

Waiting for my tech guru genius to get back from his sodding business do and HELP ME.

BTW, if you want to see more Amanda, pray twice and thrice. Everything's invisible right now.

(tearing out thinning red hair in fistfuls)

have you done a search on the filename?

ALL of them.

"unable to locate"

not on c drive, not anywhere.

Freaking. It will be OK, right? Nic knows precisely how to kick the system back into line ("Drop and give me twenty, maggot!"). He set it all up in the first palce. My novels are there. I haven't just lost everything worth living for. Right?

Eep! May he drop kick it until it gives up the goods.

deborah, don't touch anything else. This smells very virusy. Do you happen to have a DSL internet connection that has you hooked up 24/7?

Fixed.

Nic fixed, from a distance, no less. We do indeed have the virus stuff firmly in place (we run a business off this computer, after all) and we just did a full scan disk. That seems to have located and slapped all the .exe files back where they were supposed to be. Novels unharmed.

I am breathing a lot less raggedly.

Connie, we have the whatever-it-is monstro xpensive virus blocker thing for the DSL connection. It's worked so far. No sign of a virus.

(edit: now that I am calmer, from earlier: Bev, re the Wyndham-Price parental unit? WOuldn't he be rather younger than Giles Senior? Because isn't Wesley at least 12 to 15 years younger than Rupert?)

BTW, Nic thinks the hypertext doc may have been created by one or more of the cats walking on the keyboard. Too damned shaming; they can create hypertext and I can't.

What was the problem? Were the .exe extentions being blocked or something?

Damn, you can take the girl out of tech support, but ...