Oops, have found reset and sent instructions to granddaughter, will report on result.

Thank you Shorena, your reply came in while I am typing this.

I sent all my children and grandchildren 1 BTC for Christmas, Dec 2014. Heady days, worth $1000 Mt. Gox said! Offering to buy it back from all of them now for $300. I think Bitcoin has a way to go before muggles can easily trade and safely store it.

My granddaughter is trying to send me 1 BTC with multibit, her program shows it is sent but blockchain.info shows it still there. She thinks she may have been offline when she sent it.

You wrote:
"If you see a triangle in the status it basically means the transaction was not sent to the Bitcoin network successfully.

When you do a reset blockchain and transactions it resyncs your wallet to what is on the blockchain.
It is what is on the blockchain that is definitive."

How exactly do you do a reset?

Is bitcoin the currency of the future or is it the exclusive domain of geeks? If it is going to be taken seriously, then we have to be concerned about a carefree "serves them right" attitude to theft. When hard currency is stolen a lot of serious people get involved in solving the crime and recovering the money. If bitcoin is going to be generally adopted then some thought has to be given to the protection from criminals of unsophisticated buyers. It is not the theft itself that threatens the bitcoin project, it is the reaction to it.

I appreciate the advice and information that is available in the forum but it should be easier for newbies to find and to separate the tech issues from practical advice. Finding and navigating forums is not easy for newbies. Do the traders have a link on their sites to a newbie security handbook? They should. Can the traders agree on the contents of it? Who should write such a book? We all should, perhaps a Bitcoin users security wiki?

Is this it, generally agreed upon? https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Wallet_Security_Dos_and_Don'ts_(Windows)

I'm talking about "allinvain" who posted in Bitcoin discussion  http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=16457.320

The successful heist of 25,000 bitcoins undermines the whole bitcoin project. It behoves (sorry about the antique word, I'm an old guy) the movers and shakers in the bitcoin world to solve it, quickly.

How I see it: To really help this guy would need a lot of detailed information, not only technical but personal. So I will make some assumptions and based on these suggest a way forward.

He is young, technically savvy, got in very early to buy 25,000 at a good price. When it peeked briefly at $30 he was theoretically worth $750,000 which is intoxicating and almost impossible to keep quiet about. Perhaps he told someone he shouldn't have. A fellow student, co-worker, family even, someone who could discover his passwords without having to hack anything. $750,000 is a substantial sum and could, apparently did, inspire serious felony. Such a large sum should be kept in a safe, in this case meaning a dedicated computer which would not be connected to the internet except when actually necessary to do so to trade. As soon as the trade is completed, log off and physically disconnect. All preliminary and follow-up correspondence would be done from another box.

What to do? He needs to hire a very highly skilled investigator, not only technical but also an old-fashioned detective. This will cost a bundle which, I assume, he hasn't got. So offer a reward. It would have to be substantial to get the calibre of man needed to solve this case. Probably about one third or more of the amount stolen, say 10,000 bitcoins. A lot of money to lose, but better than losing the whole lot.

And, when it all shakes out, please let us know whodunnit and howdunnit so we can all make the bitcoin saga safer.