>::My latest and greatest
>
>Oh, my!
>
>I can't resist -- what happened to the fellow?

Oh, he still works there. He has the advantage of being a minority owner. I was able to bail them out and back up and running by the next morning. It was a long night however [finished about 3:30am]. They were lucky I still remembered enough Novell to salvage their data with minimal loss. They had no clue where their Novell disks were, so they had to go down to the local CompUSA store and buy Win2K Server, 2 new workstations and several copies of WinXP Pro to replace and/or upgrade some old DOS 6.x machines. I also had to migrate them over to the Windows version of the software they were running. This is the custom app we developed for this franchise that we had been begging them for years to upgrade to.

The next day, I was able to get them a real UPS with NO surge only outlets, a CD-RW drive, some CD-RW disks and backup software where their backup is now automated as long as they stick a disk in the drive. Their previous backup was to a 100MB zip drive and automated, but they rarely remembered to insert a disk. I set up a 6 disk rotation - one for each business day. So all they have to do is coordinate the name on the disk with the day of the week and they will have a well planned and executed backup system. I have ZERO confidence in them following through on that.

I also plugged their fax machine into a power strip plugged into a different wall outlet with instructions NOT to plug it into the server UPS.

This was a most expensive lesson as you can see, but it could have been a lot worse if they had lost their data.