Chris, Nigel, Danb, and Lukitoh:

Many thanks to all of you for your excellent advice. I agree that keeping your hard drive backed up (and 'to current date') essential.

I will now be definitely purchasing Norton Ghost (or similar product). It appears the HUGE advantage to Norton Ghost is that, because it saves an exact duplicate image of your entire exisiting hard drive, this will enable you (in the event of a hd crash) to MUCH MUCH MORE quickly get everything which was on your original hd, loaded on to a new hard drive, avoiding the necessity of reinstalling everything from scratch again (Windows XP, applications programs, app updates, etc). This would save hours, days, or perhaps weeks of work having to re-install every one of your software programs one by one, as well as having to locate/download 'one by one' the application updaters for each of the associated programs as well.

It's apparent to me now, that unless you backup your entire hard drive using Norton Ghost (or similar 'disk image' software), that there's no need to backup anything except for: user 'document files' & the original 'application installers'. I would assume that there's no benefit to backing up individual Windows XP System files or the installed Applications files located in the 'Program Files' folders, as these can only really be successfully reinstalled by re-launching the orginal application's 'installer' programs, right?

Thanks again in advance for feedback and clarification of this.

Scott