[timmy2]

I greatly appreciate your reply. I assume A&I is a menu option available when booting the Leopard DVD, and that it creates the Previous System folder. As I said, being a Windows beast, when a system seems very corrupted I favor a "bare metal reinstall".

Given the weird behaviors of iTunes and Photoshop, the fact that I saw Quicken and some other program folders on the 2nd hard drive, and her statements that "all kinds of things went wrong" and "files would no longer save" after she tried using TimeMachine considered all together sounds like fairly widespread corruption to me... IF it were a Windows PC. I don't know enough about Macs to have a sense for what an A&I install can accomplish.

Is it sensible to try the A&I to see if the symptoms all go away, and then resort to the E&I if some of them remain -- is that the conventional wisdom amongst Mac experts?

Thanks again!