Thank-you for the article. It was a good read (sounded more like a blog post though). The readers got some good tips out of it, but what remains is a mystery is how the master database got corrupted. Something has to have gone wrong - things don't just blow up all of a sudden. It would have been nice if you could have made a passing reference (like "...the master database got corrupted because ... "). If it was something new or unheard of - it might save somebody else a few sleepless afternoons.