Bravo to all that replied with all the great pointers! After seeing all the replies and speaking with the local mechanic I finally found the REAL problem. I put everything back together on the engine except for the vacuum hose to the sensor, fired her up, removed the gas cap and took a listen. Sure enough, I heard some spraying in the tank! Took off the rear body assembly, pulled out the sending/pump unit and found the rupture on the back side of the hose...a nice 3/4" gash. Replaced it with a new piece, put her all back together(including reattaching the vacuum hose to the sensor), reconnected my mowing deck and as I write this, my wife is out mowing the yard!!! I can't thank you all enough for helping me out in diagnosing the problem!!! Saved me $282 for a problem caused by what probably amounted to a $1.00 worth of rubber...if that! Maybe all said and done an hour of total labor from the time the mower stopped running until now. Great job and what a great website. Thanks again mownie and engine_tech, Tom

INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE The error usually looks like this *** STOP: 0x0000007B (0x8196C270,0xC0000032,0x00000000,0x00000000) INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE Is that what you had a blue screen? STOP 0x0000007B errors are caused by device driver issues (especially those related to hard drive and other storage controllers), viruses, data corruption, and sometimes even hardware failures. Keep your eyes on it.

Vista has diagnostic capabilities so you might try running the repair feature. Below is a graphical tutorial on how to run the onboard repair program. Here is a link that might be useful: Vista repair tutorial

That's a good question. I was using a Dell Inspiron 4000 w/ windows 2000 professional and before that a Compaq latitude (I think) also with Win2000 professional. The compaq had a lot of the typical corporate stuff on it, like outlook, office, etc. Both of these computers took at least 3 minutes to get up and running, despite turning off apps from start-up, periodically running antivirus, ad-aware, etc., and also defragging and running disc-clean-up. Based on all this, and also through conversations with strangers on their laptops (in places like Panera, starbucks, etc.) I thought that a couple minutes was typical. If I could get the Inspiron to boot in less than a minute I would keep it. But right now it's too aggravating to use. Any advice on that would be greatly appreciated.