For both of you who saw the strange tweets this morning, yes, I did get a computer upgrade. And no, these things rarely go smoothly.
This time the problem was related to a beta utility I'd installed to (oh, irony of ironies) help solve Windows issues. So after the OS burned down, fell over, and sank into the swamp, I repaired it. And it stood!
For the geeks, the details: An AMD X4 840 processor with a Gigabyte motherboard and 8 GB of RAM. In non-geek terms, that means I went from a dual core processor to a quad core. The dual core had a pair of 2.8 GHz processors, and this has four 3.2 GHz processors. In very mundane terms, it's better, stronger, faster.
Paul put the hardware together tonight and I spent most of the day getting drivers installed and tweaking stuff. There's still plenty to tweak, but for now I'm just glad to have my computer back.
This means I can get back to the sekkrit projekt.