> I wish I had gotten this advice before we did all that... it possibly could > have saved us a lot of time and the $300 > for the MS tech. You probably did the right thing, anyway. The simple solutions generally have long-term consequences that might not be obvious at the time. If you mess up the directory you could end up with a machine with very peculiar problems that you cannot figure out....users that can't get or send mail one day but can the next...etc. Been there, done that by running a hard repair on the directory. It's taken quite a bit of time to iron out the results of that.