Alan, Peter, Dave, and particularly Jeff----Thank you for you varied advice. With lots of trials and filtering ideas, I think I have it beat. I gave a summary of my solution to Derek Lowe, which follows below. Cheers John >>Thanks Derek, I had forgotten about TBK and Jeff Coleman got to me before you with a copy of #3(f). This was helpful but it was more like getting advice on how to boil an egg rather than what I wanted which was how to fry it! Never the less it got my thought processes going and I seem to have a solution which allows me to have WinBMD.exe reside in in Program Files along with all other program files and all data in a sub-directory of My Documents , where in a rebuild it cannot be scrambled( & no virtual files). The problem seems to be that when in FreeBMD I try to browse and select my normal place to save (Viz ...\My Documents\FreeBMD and save, it just would not save and would keep reverting to the default ( .\Output ). Then I noticed it had a box for New Folder so I did that and changed New Folder to FreeBMD2 so now the save path is ..\My Documents\FreeBMD\FreeBMD2. This seem to be working just fine, but I will not be really happy until my smile lasts another month. I have managed to find all lost files, hidden files, read only files etc. and put them all in my data Directory. That all said your idea of reinstalling in C:\ and saving in My Docs or such would have been ok too, as I already do this with another rogue program. I was just about ready to try when I stumbled on to above solution. Cheers John <<