Update: I told my employees I was training, on their first day, that I was giving them the hardest, most irritating stuff, and the "exceptions" to everything we did. Trial by fire. LF got to have the hardest, most irritating, and what better be the exception to his ride home. He got on the wrong bus. In Nashville, all buses lead to the downtown Nashville terminal. I couldn't get him to understand that's what he was supposed to do if he missed his stop last night, so now he knows. Thanks to the kindness of stranger. Since he couldn't hear me on the phone, the bus was too loud. Then, he lost his bus pass. The police officer gave him the ok to get on it and get home. The bus driver called me (thank God Almighty I had the great sense to get a line added last night and to charge the phone up) and made double sure he was in the right place. He made it. Terrified and upset while downtown, but has figured it all out. And I was incredibly upset because I couldn't find out what bus he was on, and we couldn't hear each other on the phones. All's well that ends well, 'specially when a hard-learned lesson was exacted. OY!

Hard to say what you should back up because we do not know what you have. All personal data, email addresses and perhaps favourites/bookmarks of course. As importantly is the drivers for all the motherboard stuff like sound, LAN IDE or SATA drivers. However if you have the CD that came with the motherboard they will all be there. If this is a factory built machine you should have either a recovery partition on the hard drive or CDs. If a factory built life can be easy, just start the recovery process and the computer gets returned to the state it was when it left the factory. You will need drivers for any add on boards like a video or sound card if these are not built into the motherboard. What make and model is this? As Zep says, don't mess with your registry. Nothing will be improved but much could go wrong compounding your problems.

Lightning does the darndest things. I would check the logic board for burnt or missing traces on the P.C. board. If there aren't any obvious causes I would opt for a new opener.

i love storms and being in the lightning capitol along the I-4 corridor of orlando, we see more lightning than anywhere in this country. i do unfortunately have a dog that stresses out about storms thou and every few weeks our power does go out for several hrs from our daily pounding storms from may-nov. i have been standing at the kitchen window when my neighbors backyard trees were hit, that was a bit startling. i can't tell you how many electronic things we've lost to lightning damage thru phone lines, cable and once a direct hit to our fence that was anchored to the house via screws. i do still like watching it thou(from inside only!), we get such huge bolts and many w/ massive branching patterns. thurs. i was driving home from work sitting at a red light when 4 bolts struck all at the same time in front of me :-) of course all that lightning caused traffic signals to go out in an area w/ 6 lanes of traffic in ea direction LOL plus 2 trees atleast 30' tall also came down in the roadways along my 8 mi drive home....regular events here in rain season. we just had our late afternoon storms roll thru and per hour cloud to ground srikes were over 2400. not an extreme amount for us but nowhere else even sees that in a single day. there rarely is a day that goes by in rain season, w/o a house being struck and most often burns to the ground. about once a month someone is struck by lightning here in central FL. a rare strike on a car happened last fri along merrit island. i love lightning but from inside and safe only! ~ liz Here is a link that might be useful: lightning research in FL