A big thank you to Robert G. Van den Heuvel (pc_repair -at earthlink.net), the technician for Compunerds (compunerds -at lycos.net), who solved the problem. Who would have thought to power-cycle the router? Actually, Robert not only fixed that, but optimized our machines, discovered that the new CD-RW drive was defective (yet another excellent product bought at Frys!), gave us some advice on computers, and provided a laugh on his invoice, with his comment about “reassembling a cheap Taiwanese PC”. He also made the excellent suggestion of getting a large external USB hard drive for backups, instead of trying to back up to multiple CDs. Highly, highly recommended. He was also very, very personable.
I feel much better now.