BOAC,
What you suggested gets me a response that the program to write the Recovery Disk is broken. I eventually talked for a half-hour with someone at Dell ... he spoken with a very thick Spanish accent. Even though the system is less than a week old, he wanted $100 to fix the problem. I don't intend to pay $100 for listening a person whose English I can't understand. He claimed that there was a virus ... but McAfee doesn't find one. At least I have a legal Win 7 Pro installation disk .... maybe it has a "Repair" mode which will preserve the drivers. Rolling back time to an early Restore Point hasn't helped. Back to cogitating.
At least the rest of the system seems to work ok.