Spun my wheels for two hours until someone else came in to work. She mailed her ini file to my outside mail account, and once I had something to work with, I was able to get Notes back without losing eight years of saved data.
I never did get the backup software to work. it was hanging on a half-hour to copy an 800k .jpg file, and confidently told me it would be five days until my backup was complete. I just hope notes.ini was the ONLY file that got zapped.
So, be sure to back up your data, folks. To a stack of CDs that you can keep in your desk.