Well well well...
The bad news is, they DID tell me to wipe my hard drive...
The good news is, it fixed my problem
But don't worry, pretty soon I should be in the swing of things again - I realized that as long as I don't go about the shipset thing all at once but just download the most important ones(like the ones I'm using for my own empires!
) first and leave the rest for later then it'll be manageable.