Hi Lyle,

Thanks a lot for weighing in on my plight.  It's great to hear from a 
bonafide expert.  Your advice was excellent.  I apologize for imposing on 
this newsgroup with another question that arose, I believe, from my overly 
zealous "uninstalling".

Following your guidance,  detailed in gory detail as an appendix, the 
uninstalls and reinstall of FxRuby and Rails went smoothly.  However, 
testing the installation failed probably because on my mistake.  If my 
proposed solution below is sound,  I'd just like an OK.

** The test **
In the Command window,  I changed the directory to:
K:\_Utilities\Ruby_1.8.2-15\lib\ruby\gems\1.8\gems\fxruby-1.4.2\examples

Ran command: ruby bounce.rb

** The result **
Got error message:
k:/_utilities/ruby_1.8.2-15/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:18:
in `require__': No such file to load -- fox14 (LoadError)

** The cause?? **
As I mentioned below,  after the two uninstalls you recommended,  there 
remained two (sprurious, I thought) fox14 directories,  one in lib and one 
in ext as I recall.  Sadly, I didn't save them in Recycle bin,  so I can't 
recover them..

** The solution?? **
gem uninstall rails

gem uninstall fxruby
Control Panel | Add/Remove Pgms: Ruby
Reinstall Ruby
gem update
gem install rails

> Hope this helps

It certainly did!!  I apologize from (apparently) screwing it up.

Best wishes,
Richard Muller


******** Installation details ***************
> ... first uninstall the FxRuby by using Windows' "Add/Remove Program"
Uninstalled cleanly ... even removed the subdirectory I had incorrectly 
created!

> ... use the "gem uninstall" command
Another clean uninstall!

Additionally,  I manually deleted the other two fx14 directories. ERROR, I 
think: see problem below

However,  I left the existing 
"K:\_Utilities\Ruby_1.8.2-15\lib\ruby\gems\1.8\gems\fxruby-1.4.2" folder 
with its populated subdirectories, doc,examples,ext,lib,... intact.

"gem update" and "gem install rails" (with all its dependencies) went 
smoothly.

I wound up putting a short cut in K:\_Utilities\Ruby_1.8.2-15 to 
FxRuby-1.4.2's location: 
K:\_Utilities\Ruby_1.8.2-15\lib\ruby\gems\1.8\gems\fxruby-1.4.2  (Sorry: 
Ughh)