Sometime this week, my computer decided it didn’t want to talk to my CD or DVD drives. I can’t tell you exactly when this happened - sometime since last Thursday, the last time I know I burned a disc. It seemed to be a corrupt driver problem, and after trying the Windows stuff and having no luck, I started up some HP-specific recovery program. I thought the Next button would give me a chance to tell it what I wanted to recover. No such luck. That one mouse click put all my Windows settings back to factory settings.

I did not need this.

I am swamped under as it is this week, running hard just to keep up and falling behind anyway. And I just lost 4 hours of productive work time.

And all my iTunes playlists. And access to several programs. And all my network settings. And my custom desktop setup with all my favorite widgets.

But my data is all here (PHEW), and in the process some weird little problems seem to have worked themselves out, so it’s not a complete loss. Just a pain in the butt. A really big pain in the butt.