Yes thanks for that.  It is clear.

As discussed however, the wallet was restored OK on my laptop.

So this occurred on a fresh Win7 PC install and fresh Bitcoin 9.3 install.

The bitcoin client started after the install, and then I shut it down to change out the wallet.dat file with the backup.  Then restarted Bitcoin QT.  This is when it gave the error.  Tried several times of course.

Randomly, my wife suggested "checking my laptop", which I reinterpreted as putting the wallet.dat backup file on it, to see what happened.  The laptop is running the previous release, 9.2.1.

Magically, my bitcoins show up there now, i.e., the previously backed-up wallet.dat file was accepted by the program when started up.

Heart attack over but...ugh stupid thing.

So I had my wallet.dat file backed up and now on my new machine it won't load.  Gives this error on Bitcoin QT 9.3:

EXCEPTION: St13runtime_error
CDB : Error 1, can't open database wallet.dat
c:\Program Files\Bitcoin\bitcoin-qt.exe in Runaway exception

Any ideas?

I'll just start out by pointing out that autism is heavily represented in the coding community.

Normal people, unlike autistics who have special relationships with their computers, do not get off on the idea that their computer and other people's computers are somewhere off in the ether computing hashes and verifying encryption together.

For Bitcoin to work, it needs to work, and although to an autistic the idea that the sync takes a week means that Bitcoin is working and that the computer is working really hard, to any other normal human not afflicted with autism, this is NOT working.  To sit at 10 days behind in sync for an entire day is NOT working.

I realize that autistics have a very difficult time understanding or relating to normal human psychology.  But you all must realize that a week-long sync mentally registers as NOT working to a normal human.  It destroys confidence and credibility in Bitcoin, despite all of the other autistic stuff about how much computer power is required to break encryption and how secure it is etc etc.

Normal people know about progress bars and they know about their internet speed, and they know that they can get a 10GB HD movie off of itunes (or even torrents for the more advanced normal people) in less than an hour.  20GB is not a large amount of data and most normal people know that you should be able to download that in an hour or two.  For it to take a week on Bitcoin Core registers as Bitcoin being so incredibly slow that it is not usable.  The details don't matter.  It either works or it doesn't, and a 20GB download/sync that requires a week is NOT working...in any other software package, it would be dismissed outright.

I am sure that, say, Microsoft for example, employs lots of autistic programmers/software engineers.  And if that was all that Microsoft ever employed, we would still be typing at the black cmd window.  And if that were the case, we would have never had Microsoft.  Now I am sure that many of you autistics are guffawing right now because this is precisely what you think - that we should indeed still be typing at black command windows and judging the performance of an algorithm by your intimate familiarity of the sound of the CPU fan, instead of a progress bar.  Well I hate to have to break it, still, here in 2014, to the autistic software engineers, but normal people don't give a shit about how or why computers and code works, they just want it TO work so that they can do OTHER work...work that autistics don't understand, like software management.  Microsoft did more than hire autistic programmers, it hired normal mentally healthy people - managers and QA people, etc., to make sure that their autistic software could at least, for the most part, be used productively by the general population. 

And now think about that: if it took a week to install MS Word, or Windows XP, etc., would people buy into that?  Would a normal, healthy, non-autistic person, enjoy waiting a week for MS Word to install?  Would it give them confidence in the software?  It wouldn't matter if MS Word made you coffee and ham and eggs once you got it installed...it wouldn't matter how good it was advertised to be...because you can make yourself all those things 7 times over by the time MS Word gets working.  It doesn't matter that it works once it's working - god forbid you have to backup your work and re-install your OS, or upgrade to a new computer.  No normal person wants in the back of their mind the looming threat of being unable to write anything for a week because it takes 7 days to install MS Word.   An autistic programmer however thinks that's great because they love that they get to watch their computer sit there and whir and crunch and heat up the room for a week - the thought that bits are flipping and increasing the entropy of the room while decreasing the entropy of the hard disk (a little less so) is totally erotic to the autistic software engineer computer nerd.

Look I know that the autistic programmers for Bitcoin have very little comprehension in the way of normal human psychology.  And so what I'm letting you know is that Bitcoin will never penetrate outside of the autistic computer-addicted community, and that this will eventually be its downfall.  The downfall of Bitcoin will not be anything to do with its internal software - it will be entirely due to its intrinsic autism and its inability to relate to normal human psychology.  Psychology is what will kill Bitcoin.

It is an abnormality, in this day and age...an abnormality, to wait for ANYTHING for a week, let alone something on your computer, that amounts to the size of two games, or two 1080p movie files off of iTunes or torrents.  It is abnormal.  Bitcoin has to do better than an autistic relationship with your computer.