Thank you, essexboy, for making the time to help me through this for the past week.
A friend from the programming department is backing up my files and installing Windows 7, because month-end close needs to be finalized before the 21st and I get to handle it.
So yeah.
That was a formal thank you, but this is a formal IOU: if you want something from restoring old photos to a game, send me a message.