There was a little fallout from the way I solved the problem. My Adobe apps became inoperative and the only way I could retrieve them is by re-installing them using the DVDs. I have the whole CS4 Creative Suite. It's old, but it still serves my purposes. Surprisingly, I only had to re-install the apps. Then, Adobe took over and installed all of the updates since CS4 was issued. THAT is a real improvement from the way it used to be. A whole lot of apps that work in the background also were installed, but I had no control over that. Fortunately, I didn't lose any data at all.
Thankfully, Microsoft didn't do that to me. Office 2008 just kept on chugging along after the re-installation of the operating system. It has been a long day, but things are working well and I have two backups completed as well--one on its own hard drive on the Mac Pro and the other on an external drive. Each was about 231GB in size. They took a couple of hours each to get it done. I'm nursing an out of warranty Mac Pro and comparatively old applications, but they get along well together. At the right time, I'll upgrade, but not yet. I want to see how the new Mac Pro performs before making any decisions.
