Oh dear, another reason to consider NOT buying tablets with windows 8 installed on them. Seems like windows 8 can do nothing right! I even had someone tell me last week that Microsoft in their wisdom have decided to require you to have an outlook or hotmail email address to log onto windows 8.1 - totally lost the plot - thats really going to work well in schools as kids don't have email addresses for obvious reasons! Ok, you can get around that requirement by installing the computer disconnected to the Internet, but one should not have to work around Microsoft.

Glad that you got your system working again Brad. I use a backup program to backup firefox, thunderbird and all my important data onto my online server using rsync! That way if anything goes wrong, I have a copy off the computer! But it does remind me when I put a fresh install of windows 7 onto my shiny new SSD drive, that I should create a wim image 3 seconds after installing windows with all updates and all programs so in the event of a problem I can just restore from the base image.