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mfmadden - thanks for feedback.
Wonder what it was - probably another application program broke something. As I understand it a windows repair-install 'wraps' itself around existing installed applications - including broken ones I guess
The advantage of a clean install of everything is that you can do the things you wish you'd done last time, and not do things that you wish you hadn't done - if only that were true of real life
BTW that time when I did a repair-install that didn't fix my problem, only needed me to uninstall/reinstall the indexing service. The index files had been well and truly corrupted. Who did that then - why yours truly of course - tried to coerce it into doing something I didn't ought to have done, the problem took a while to manifest, so...
Cheers BR