Lin; Shane Brooks is an Australian programmer and fellow geek who took rather severe exception to Bill Gates shoving IE under the hood of Windows, and all of the interconnectivity that has caused so much trojanviriiworm grief, so he set out to remedy it. His first brainchild was called IE Eradicator, and it ran within windows. A few more ideas, and he came up with 98lite. The Pro version is run after you format your HDD but before windows can install itself for you. Basically, what it does is break the assembly hash table in the 9X line, and turn =everything= into a removable option. The current version (4.7, I believe), works with 98, 98SE, and WinME. Probably the coolest feature is the shell swap. If you have a Win95 CD that is OSR2.1 or earlier (in other words, any but the very last release, where they had IE shoved under the hood), you can install the 95 shell, getting rid of the active desktop completely. It also installs the 95 windows explorer, which is a lot faster than any other version and has no web crap attached to it, and forces compatibity where needed. The only downside to the shell swap is that you can't run any of the animated desktop themes like the Cathy theme, as it needs the active desktop. My current system dual boots 98lite and Win2kPro. The 98lite comes up in less than 30 seconds. There's also a little desktop.ini file you can get that re-inserts one IE key into the top of the registry stack. This is the key that all those programs that swear they need IE5 or above to even install look for, and once found, they install without complaint. And guess what. 99% of those programs lied. -All- you lose is the html help files. For someone running a graphics program on 98, 98lite is mana from heaven. You lose next to -all- of the vulnerabilities once you yank IE, Outlook, Windows scripting, the address book, and the active desktop out. You regain maybe 10% of your system resources that were taken up by the mere presence of those programs and 'features'. And if you take care as to the order of installation of drivers, you get an OS that looks like 95, performs better than 98, and almost never throws BSOD. Anyone who is running Vue on 98 should look at this...