Mari,

in your first post, you said you were running Snow Leopard ... then made a reference to ppl on apple boards running Snow Leopard 10.6.3.

the document you found talks about problems with updating to 10.6.6:
Was it a typo/whatever-o, or are you actually running 10.6.3? Can you do an 'about' and tell me exactly what system version you are running?

things still confused about the vacation. sigh. i am torn. but if i left, it wouldn't be right away... meantime, i need to sit and think about other things. i can try to help you look things up. i may be able to make things more intelligible for you. a sort of tech go-between between.

that said, since system problems are delicate, the best solution for you might very well be to go to an apple store and have a tech evaluate and fix the problem. pretty sure they could, at a cost of course. this might be the least hair-pulling solution for you.

i am wondering if you keep your important documents all grouped in one or several folders, that you can identify. if so, you could simply copy these off elsewhere, without doing a full backup. (if you choose to send it in, i recommend you do this anyway.) then, at worst you'd lose system settings/preferences. but you could ask the tech if they could do a backup from where your machine/OS is at, and they might even be able to preserve those.

hang in there. it will be ok.

~ waves ~