Momentary Dev misunderstanding resolved.
--------------------------------

I quit. No really, I do. For, like, the next five minutes.

My computer has crashed twice now, both times while I'm drawing, and both times forgetting that I've saved a hundred times and reverting my image back an hour's time. You know those two new line arts I've posted? The contest piece and Nightshade? Just after I posted each one, my computer spontaneously closed all windows. I lost the entire Air Guardian portion of that file and had to retrace it, and I lost ALL OF NIGHTSHADE! She was colored. Her mane, leg fluff and eye were colored. I was tipping the image to make the tail easier to draw and *POOF!* It errors, closes, and smiles at me. No more Nightshade. No line art, no color, nothing but the jpeg I uploaded here.

I could kill my computer right now.

WHY THE F IS THIS HAPPENING?

I've had Vista all year. It's worked fine until now. I have all the appropriate patches for Illustrator and my tablet. Both have worked fine until now. It's crashed before, but never has it erased all my saved work, taking the file back to its original state, be that a half-finished sketch from months ago, or a blank page. It errors and closes automatically only when I've used up all available memory or have way too many things happening at once, like playing music, have a DVD paused in the drive, am drawing on Illustrator and am downloading all at once. I can understand a crash then... but now?

So yeah, this weekend is hopefully computer-doctor day. My brother is his own geek squad, so maybe between the two of us we can get this thing erased and reformatted. I like the Vista operating system, and I need the Media package it comes with for a current school project, but I can't afford another crash in the middle of a presentation or a school art assignment. So the plan is to uninstall everything, and worry about it all tomorrow.