Call lind Electronics in St Louis park. We make power supplies for laptops. The ones for cars are manufactured right here in Minnesota. We also re-sell A/C adapters.

If you make a Norton Ghost (or other type) image backup on CD(s) before you let the kids screw it up, then you can easily restore the disk image back to the way it was. It saves a lot of work. This sounds like your fault, not theirs. :-)

Or you could burn a Linux LiveCD and just boot into that for the time being. I do that quite frequently on machines with hosed drives and the like - when you're done, just remove the CD from the drive and everything works normally. Those babies are a real lifesaver...

Google for "Microsoft Antispyware" I wouldn't have thought it but the Beta is better than any anti-spyware we've used which would include Adaware and Spybot Search and Destroy. We now use it exclusively to clean and protect our corporate desktops.