Why would I laugh? I’m the one who almost had to trade my white hat for a grey hat because I snuck into an office at work at 4:30 a.m., used a field support rep’s administrator password, and used software on a USB keychain drive to make copies of the DLL and registry so I could fix The Beast. I ran the two registries side by side, and read them line by line, until I found and fixed the problem. I couldn’t just swap them because of the differences in software . . . what a nightmare that was!

To make it even worse, the system at work crashed (in an unrelated incident) a couple of weeks later and I had to make up an enormously ridiculous, highly technical explanation of how I could fix it when field support said the drive needed to be replaced.

The articles should always say “Have an extra formatted hard drive on hand with your OS installed in case you have to run the drive you are messing with as a slave so you can fix it.” And “Always back up your registry before screwing with it.” And “Remember that Windows doesn’t even like other versions of itself, much less anything else, so make sure the Savior Drive has the same version, with matching updates.”

And I haven’t installed SP2, but haven’t had any notes from The Blue Beyond . . . check your settings. I believe my beast is set for “Dysfunctionally Paranoid.”

There’s not much of a learning curve in Macs — your stuff is just never, ever, ever where it is supposed to be. EVER.

Have you thought about switching the girls to homemade flour/salt/paste type clay? You can color it, and at least you won’t worry about Miss Bunny. Miss Puppy certainly didn’t like it, which lead briefly to OTHER interesting things on the rug.