Thanks, uT6, i'll give your suggestion a try. Believe it or not, we were trying to see if we needed to replace the fan in this Vaio laptop. My friend who took the laptop apart tried using a weak magnet to remove the screws...
Then we went to one of those small but very powerful magnets that i had around. It worked just fine. We blew out the fan and put the laptop back together again.
Then it wouldn't boot. We got most of grub and the boot screen but then, nothing. i finally reinstalled PCL 2012 - 2 on it and created a guest account (ID 500) and then my old account "frazelle09" and it was assigned ID 501. At least i had access to all of my old files however i had many permission problems. So i used Krusader and reassigned user and group and permissions to all of my files and directories.
This worked pretty well although i had to go and delete the group account. i discovered that i still had to reissue the user and group and permissions to all my old directories and files again because LibreOffice wasn't running.
So most newly installed programs now seem to work o.k. except for Clementine, so i'll give your suggestion a try and see what happens.
Thanks for replying and have a great evening!
