>So basically, I really have no choice but to uninstall/reinstall (unless I want to shrink myself, crawl into my wife's ear, and reconnect all the synapses I blew)

WRT to shrinking, I'd be more worried about what she'd do with the pizza shears after you nod off in front of the TV watching a ballgame...but, yeah, either get VFP to forgive and restore its initial settings, or do the safe thing and uninstall/reinstall. The secret is knowing to do an uninstall-reinstall; installing over the top of a damaged registry or set of runtime files that might have gotten date/timestamped later than the ones on CD often leaves you with a broken system that doesn't have a credible uninstall left.