Well, this time the broth healed the patient! I just ripped the battery out (it wasn't a user friendly battery holder) it flipped accross the MB and then I put in a new one. Now, boot goes nicely to the logon screen and it recognises my passphrase!!! Thank you very much and thanks to all of you that gave your time to this issue! :) / peace

Great!

Update: I thought I should mention that after changing the CMOS battery I didn't restore the default bios settings in any manner, I just set and saved the date and time, which actually didn't hold , and in spite of that the log in issue was fixed! Once logged in to the disk, the date and time were wrong, so I checked the bios and saw that the date and time were just marginally up from the default time of Jan. 2006. I reset the date and time and chose the option there to restore the default settings, saved it, and this time the date and time held! But after login, only the date is correct, the time displayed is always the time I last logged off. However, I've been able to surf anyway and the time updates in about a minute when I have a 4G connection. So, that's my story and I'm stickin to it. Hope this makes sense to someone or helps someone like me to whom it doesn't make any sense! Thanks again for your support! / peace