hehe, glad you figured that one out mat
I usually have the following method:
- optimised system restore only running on the windows installation partition. All other stuff is on a different partition or drive that is backed up regularly.
I really should ghost the windows installation to speed up recovery times but never seem to get around to it.

the boids stuff is going ok (between a new 10week group project sprint and having to hand a report in)
I'm playing with particles and curves (later surfaces) to simulate traffic flow for the animation. At present it'll be single lanes but later it'll be multi lane traffic *hopefully* with obstacle avoidance and lane changing. Saying that, at the current rate the animation progress might suffer so that the technical side gets done...

Si