This is a story of the daily backup that messed up the monthly backup.

I had forgotten that Maya stores important application data in the My Documents folder. Here's what happened:

When I did my partition image restore, my next step was to copy back the incremental backup files from my documents folder on the network backup, back to my workstation. Apparently, the corrupt Maya file was on the network server, having been backed up just before I trashed my workstation's partition. When I did my copy back of document folders, I unwittingly copied back the problem files that caused Maya to fail.

I only discovered this through a systematic rebuild of the Maya environment. On the last go round, I didn't copy back the documents folder--and Maya started up normally. That was the clue. After copying the documents folders back, Maya failed again. That's when it clicked for me. I confirmed that Maya DID in fact have a folder in among the document folders, and that was the problem. So I did a rebuild, copied back all the documents except for Maya's folder and everything worked out.

Just as I was solving this, my NEC AccuSync 120 monitor lost it's high voltage supply, causing the picture to 'zoom in' and blur and fade to black.