[Walter]

But as I said, you should be able to do a reinstall of Snow Leopard, which is the equivalent of an archive-and-install. They just renamed it to make it clearer to most users.

Yes i did run the Snow Leopard installer but but it overwrites the entire drive and all my previously installed programs are completely erased and i ended up with a fresh Snow Leopard with just Apple programs. My previously installed applications such as midi/audio programs and games were gone.

Apple has removed the ability to do an archival install which in previous operating systems would create a "new" set of systems folders and move the previous set of systems folder's to a separate folder named "previous".

Reading the various postings at Apple's forum concludes that the Archival install is no longer available.

However, if you have tried and succeed an archival install with the Snow Leopard installer whereby all third party applications are still there then please let me know how that is done because all my third party applications were erased. It even warns you about that when you launch the installer.

I'm sorry that you're frustrated, but it seems that "My Living Desktop" should have a way to restore its own functionality without requiring this kind of extreme action... note that you could try the OS reinstall over the backup to see if you get the result you want, too, without affecting your regular drive...

I did try installing the "combo" OS but that did not solve it.

With My Living Desktop you can remove the installation but when i removed it and then re-installed I had the same problem. I did the permissions thing but still no luck.

You can make multiple backups with SuperDuper!, as explained in the Introduction to the User's Guide, to cover this case.

I will have to study those instructions and see if SuperDuper can create a series of backups to go back to rather then making a copy of a corrupted operating system which is what happened to me.

Thanks again.