As for MS Office, it stopped working when unwanted programs which came with the laptop were uninstalled. As often occurs, when you delete a program (or run a registry cleaner), some things get deleted which are not supposed to be and affect other functions. I have Office running correctly now.
As for Acronis... that is still not working properly. The imaging function is out for now, and I can't tell for sure about "cloning" because I'm reluctant to try. Part of cloning is to "delete the partition on the target drive"... but if that is done and THEN the computer doesn't boot (not booting from the boot disk is the current problem), I'll have to reinstall all the software from scratch.
I have a cloned copy of the HD, but I won't use it except as a "last resort"... that is, the last thing I'll try before knowing I'll probably have to reinstall all the software from scratch anyway.
It's my wife's computer... she uses it mostly for recreation and email, so it's a low priority around here. (Don't tell her I said that.) At the present time, I'm not devoting energy to running down the problem any further.
I believe the boot problem is one with the hardware... the HP Notebook Pavilion dv6000.
And while I'm at it.... I find the HP notebook to be annoying. Not only because of this current booting problem, but it also aborts booting if a USB device is attached... like a flash drive. My old Dell notebook booted with a flash drive mounted, but HP tech support told me the intentionally don't want theirs to boot if a USB device (other than a mouse or printer) is attached. This reason alone would stear me away from HP for further purchases.
