thanks for the reply, jerry.
yea, restarting and deleting the preferences did not fix the problem.
i copied my original project file to the desktop and set the autosave vault and render scratches to my desktop as well. so for now i can work off of that. i guess when it comes time to return the drive, i will simply copy those folders back over onto the hard drive and hope it works out.
still, i would like to find out what is wrong here…