Good news: The computer is back to normal. I got MS Word to run again by deleting normal.dot. Thank God for tech discussion forums. I also did a system restore to get the display not to look like Windows 1.0. I even put in more memory (courtesy of Mom) though it turned out to be unnecessary. The computer is now running better than it ever has. Maybe with more memory I can run a game like The Sims.
I am thoroughly enjoying my vacation. Yesterday I watched Mystic River. Why does every mystery have to have some kind of stupid "big twist" at the end? In so many of those generic crime shows, the culprit ends up being a)the wife/mother/grandmother or b)a young kid that nobody suspected. It's unrealistic for the most part. And now that it has been used as a plot device over and over, it has even become predictable.