I know I had a bad weekend -- computer blew up (literally). Was everyone else out having fun??

Must be something in the water... last week, I had two very bad mishaps on 2 different machines. I'm still recovering data, but it's down to non-essential stuff (and I do keep redundant backups offsite for most of it). Like you, I lost a couple of hundred megs of art, photos, and text that I rummaged through when I needed an idea for a site or article. Sorry to hear you smoked your machine.

(Now here's where we put this "on topic")
Our misery brings up a point... Is the procedure for restoring the Links-SQL database from its backups already in place and documented?

It's in place, just not that documented. To restore from backup you need to first delete the current links (assuming they aren't all lost already). You can do this using the SQL monitor:

DELETE FROM Links

and that will erase them all. Then, click on Import, and type in the path to your latest backup and it should import them all back in.

Cheers,

Alex