ok, ran OTCleanIt - no problems.

clamwin might be an annoyance i have to live with? though very happy to get rid of it if you can find some way of doing that.

otherwise, you have certainly rescued my computer from near certain doom, and a lot of my unbackedup work over the last six months with it. will definitely continue running AVG anti-virus (surprisingly, does not drain that much processing power) and probably buy an outboard USB storage device for backing things up more readily (i have about 100G of cubase audio processing projects and documents that should probably be updated weekly at least, and i've run out of dvd-rs.)

let me know if there's anything else i should do to keep myself clean. and a million thank you's again for all your time and expertise over the past (almost) week of nailbiting and cursing at my computer - don't know what i would have done without you. (probably reformat and cry a lot...)