So much for staying off the phone and resting. I have been in computer hell all day. It started at some point before I left for an omelet at noon. I thought it was the trackpad spazzing out, because it had taken on a complete life of its own - it would open windows and sites and documents without me clicking, I'd try writing an e-mail and it would highlight and delete the text - just crazy stuff, and my dropbox folder was like in an endless loop of messaging me deleting and adding the same crap over and over again. I called Apple but while I was talking to them I just clicked the trackpad a bunch of times and that seemed to fix it.
Then I came home and it was worse. I called Apple again and we did the troubleshooting things and she suggested I take the trackpad in to the Apple Store. Since I could barely use it without creating utter havoc on my desktop I disconnected it and enabled my old magic mouse. And that did the same thing, which meant it wasn't either device but the computer itself. We did some further stuff and then she told me we'd have to do a complete operating system reinstall. That made me very nervous so I asked for a senior tech. She walked me through various things but nothing helped so we are doing the reinstall now. She assured me everything would be exactly they same when it completes - all my saved stuff, passwords, etc. The problem is it takes ninety minutes or more and she's leaving at four-thirty. She said there's a chance it could complete sooner and the hope is that everything will work, at which point I'm going to install Mountain Lion, the new operating system. She gave my number to the fellow next to her, just in case she leaves before it's done and she said he'd call me.