Hi Dave, Ketil,

Yikes! People _do_ occasionally get into problems that require
uninstalling, then re-installing Guide. But none of them (as far as
I know) have required re-installing Windows.

That _is_ regrettably necessary, sometimes, with other software.
Something will happen to corrupt the system registry or to replace
DLLs with a newer or older version, leading to "DLL hell". Guide
doesn't do much with the system registry or system files, so it's
relatively immune from such oddities.

Dave, a couple of things to check before uninstalling or reinstalling
things: first, make sure the first Guide CD is in the CD drive. If
you run Guide with nothing installed to the hard drive, and without
a Guide CD in the CD drive, you are supposed to get a polite message
telling you that Guide needs a CD. But some people have found that
this doesn't happen. (I still haven't figured out how!)

Also, you should probably grab the current version of the software:

http://www.projectpluto.com/update8.htm

I would recommend doing this anyway, even if Guide were working
perfectly, because a _lot_ of interesting things have been added
to the updates. But it's also common for "strange, unreproducible
bugs" to vanish when an update is applied. Sometimes a corrupted
file is replaced by one from the update. Other times, a bug present
in the original software got fixed at some point in the new software.

-- Bill