TRAPPED FOR FOUR HOURS on a flight packed with irritable travelers waiting for takeoff in Washington, D.C., Bob Davis couldn't help but wonder if the delay was an omen. He was on his way to a job interview. Even before the flight he'd had qualms, but as he sat on the runway as the hours ticked by, he really started to worry. Forty-five years old at the time, Davis had nimbly scaled the corporate ladder to win the job of chief accounting officer at Dell Inc. Then came a call from a headhunter asking him if he would consider going to Computer Associates International Inc., the Islandia, New York-based software giant rocked by an accounting scandal. Part of the allure was a chance to work with Jeff Clarke, CFO of Computer Associates, whom he had met years earlier when Clarke was CFO of Compaq Computer Corp. But taking the post would mean joining the cleanup crew at a very messy corporate crime scene.

As he fretted about the risks of the new job, things got worse. Bad weather forced the aircraft to divert to Syracuse, New York, for several hours before finally landing at New York's LaGuardia Airport. At 3 A.M., Davis arrived at his hotel to find no room at the inn. Sent across town to a fleabag motel, he had time for only a half-hour nap before showering and shaving for a full day of interviews. But despite the rocky start, Davis was intrigued by the opportunities at CA, as the company is now officially known. Three months later, lured by a pay package that could be worth $2.3 million or more over the next two years, he joined the company.

As chief financial officer, Davis is a key member of the team working to resurrect the $3.5 billion company. Once one of the stars of the software industry, CA crashed in 2002 when federal regulators charged certain top executives with falsifying financial records in a $3.3 billion fraud that began in 1998. Now operating under an innovative legal deal called a deferred-prosecution agreement, or DPA, CA's executives are racing to complete reforms while bolstering the company's core business in an increasingly competitive software market.