put your country of residence in as the UK or France I think - USA will be routed to RailEurope, a SNCF subsidy (which more and more is kind of matching even discount fares sold at www.voyages-sncf.com)

Discounted tickets are train-specific and non-refundable nor changeable I believe - you should put more fudge factor time in IMO or else on site if you miss the train you'll have to buy a full fare ticket.

My friend returning to Paris last week said her Delta flight landed in the middle of the airport, way away from any terminal and it was slow getting shuttle buses, etc. - she said it took about an hour to get to the terminal and then you have to go to the train station - no you need more time IMO.

Don't try to access English. You'll end up on RailEurope and pay premium prices.

Put France down as the country for pickup of tickets.

If you get the best fares (available 3 months out exactly from your dates of travel), they will be PREM fares (indicated on the SNCF site - they're the orange ones), you print them out at home - no need to pick them up anywhere, and no need to composte them at the station. Just have ID with you so the conductor can match your ticket with your ID.

Timing depends to some extent on which terminal you're flying into. The Gare SNCF is in terminal 2. If you're flying into Terminal 1, it might be a stretch to make it to your 11:40 train.

If you're having problems with www.sncf.com, try www.tgv-europe.com and pick Africa or Australia.

Before printing your tickets out, save them as PDFs on your web e-mail do that you can retrieve them in case you misplace the original printout.

You can access English by putting your country in as Great Britain. It will ask you if you'd like to pay in pounds or euros but otherwise be the same information from the French site, just in English.

I use http://www.tgv-europe.com/en/?rfrr=Homepage_footer_United%20Kingdom

You should also reference this thread on Fodor's: SNCF Train Ticket Online Booking Payment Difficulty ( http://www.fodors.com/community/europe/sncf-train-ticket-online-booking-payment-difficulty.cfm ). I completed purchase of 2 PREMS today (April 17) after some credit card difficulty (my post appears near or at the bottom of the thread). I proceeded through www.voyages-sncf.com as if I was French, making liberal use of Google Translate whenever a question or option was not obvious. After my credit card was finally accepted, I retrieved and printed out my PREMS in PDF format. Good luck!

There is an incredibly helpful post on this site by MorganB walking you through the purchase of tickets on sncf. If you search her name, you can find it.

This is a well-worn topic and as usual with rail questions, all of the answers (and then some) can be found at www.seat61.com
However, my condensed rules of thumb. 1) Use www.tgv-europe.com for easy English access. 2) On the front page choose Other Countries. 3) On the following page pull down the Trains menu. Click on Book Online, and add your dates and destinations. 4) Then specify an English-speaking country other than US, to avoid the RailEurope bump. Or pick Antarctica; it works and you don't have to go there to pick up you tickets. 5) Make your purchase.
6) Tickets are available approx. 90 days in advance. The iDTGV tickets, very low rates on a limited set of destination combinations, are available now into early summer.
7) Some inter-city tickets can be printed at home. You take them aboard, without validation, to be checked by the conductor with your passport, and, rarely, the credit card used for the purchase. Other purchases give you a confirmation number which you can print to show to any SNCF boutique or mainline station agent to obtain your tickets (which must be punched by a validation machine on the platform before heading for your train car.) Station ticket machines can be used if you have a chip-and-pin card.

Thank you all for the help. I did a few more dry runs and all went well. However, the schedule is not ideal and while I was fishing about for alternatives, I received an email from AA changing our first leg timing thus making the ORD connection too tight for comfort. A call to AA yielded a small miracle. Where there had been no flights on the days prior to ours, one opened up. So, we will leave a day early, "suffer" a day and night in Paris and take an early train from there. Things just get better.