Further to my last post...
Right then... I have found, buried at the bottom of a box assorted junk what appears to be two DVD's relating to the Acer marked Recovery Disc 1 and 2...Choosing the F12 boot option 'Boot from CD' brings the Acer recovery system into play and offers two options.
Recover the whole system to Manufactures original default state which loses all data stored on drive C pictures, music etc
OR Restore the OS only, in which case all other files, good or infected, are moved to C\Backup.
I tried the second option and it after it goes into copy mode, after 10 seconds or so the DVD tray opens and I am asked to insert a 'disco de imagen correcto' by which I can only assume they are talking about Clean Blank DVD, it doesn't translate very well... I don't have any blank DVD-Rs in the house at the moment so before I progress any further down this route I have to ask "is this a reasonable supposition" on my part? It's certainly not the other recovery DVD, that just gets spat out again with a request to install disc one and start again... does it have to be a DVD or could I use some blank space on a spare HD driven by USB that I use for bulk file storage...
pp