Galen

I did try a repair install on my backup OS disk but though it restored the
Administrator account it corrupted some applications so it was not a
solution.

I will now try your suggestion of renaming the default Administrator
account, creating a new User Account and pasting in the profile from Default
user.

I too have spent time and money on fancy recovery tools, BART PE and
Winternals, but find them very difficult to work with and not worth the
money. With my clients I do not spend much time trying to repair systems
that will not boot. I ask them to make scheduled daily backups with Acronis
True Image version 9 on to an External hard disk which makes disaster
recovery easy and fairly quick, about 1 minute per gigabyte of the backed up
system.
--
Uncle John