well, i have some good news if you want to call it that - i'm back up on the laptop and ready to get back to what i was doing.

the last part of rebuilding the os was reconstructing all of the symbolic links in the user directories. i was getting some weird behaviour, like the start menu not acting right, so i did a clean install to one of the new disks i've had sitting, in order to get a listing of the symbolic links. them, i build them all up from scratch using the command line. not complicated, but time consuming; it is now done, and everything seems to be working correctly.

as mentioned, this mess at least gets all of the stray data from the pc ready to be filed, which i should be able to get back to shortly.

i also found another pst file - 2.5 gb of deleted data. my missing emails are no doubt in there, and i know they're recoverable, it's just a question of finding out how to do it without paying for it.

so, that was the day - copying data around and reconstructing symbolic links. it's done. and, i can start fresh in the morning.