i have had some weird stuff with this laptop, most of it i attributed to the motherboard. this time, i have found another interesting issue. i reinstalled to get a clean slate, and when i installed the ptf, it worked and went fine. then i tried installing visual basic and it didn't work the first time around, so i found a tutorial with several things that had to be done first. so, as i had just reinstalled, i figured that i would do it again, then follow the directions this time. first thing i noticed after the install was the background was the same. then i opened a browser and it had the same history, and the visual studio was in the wine folder. so, i put in a live cd and used gparted to delete the partition and hit apply. then i formatted it to ext 2 and applied that. then i put it back to ext4 and applied it again. then i reinstalled, and it was still the same. same background, browser history, files in the .wine folder. i wonder what is up, but more importantly, what do i have to do to get rid of the old data so i can install visual basic? i am familiar with not doing things right the first time, hell, that's how i learn. i just thought i knew about basic crap like this, maybe i'm missing something simple.

yeah, talk about a learning expeerience. i set up a seperate partition for /home for just this reason. it took about two hours of thinking while doing other things to figure it out. now, the question remains, how do i blow out the wine so i can start over? it seems all i have to do is unistall wine and take the settings along, but anyway, that should do it. have a good laugh at this one, set it up like that and forget, then wonder what is going on.