There were a lot of XP-specific issues addressed in a Poser Technical Forum thread: NTFS "features" locking out the Poser folders? by hogwarden on 4/21/02 Here's an excerpt of a post I made in that thread with info on how to customize and tweak an XP installation for smoother operation. ************************************** I LOVE XP's stability, and many of it's features, but MS in their ongoing drive to eliminate those pesky annoying choices that make for unnecessary Support calls crippled or eliminated most of the customization options I wanted/needed/was used to, or just made access to them so hard to find they might as well be gone. So I invested considerable time researching what options were available and where/how to access. Some require external utilities to reach, others (like obliterating the MS Messenger nags and de-installing it entirely) required obscure command-line options. Turning off 50 or 60 of the useless background "Services" that MS felt should be on all the time by default freed up a lot of resources as well. I'm really happy with XP and how I've got it set up right now, but it took some work before I was comfortable with it, and confident it was fully on my team. Some of the sites I found usefull; http://www.tweaktown.com/document.php?dType=guide&dId=120&dPage=1 http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/home/using/tips/default.asp http://www.tweakxp.com/tweakxp/default.asp http://members.aol.com/axcel216/ http://support.microsoft.com/newsgroups/default.aspx?ICP=GSS3&NewsGroup=microsoft.public.windowsxp.general&SLCID=US&scrollnews=m10s2s5 http://www.annoyances.org/ http://www.tipsdr.com/ Utilities I found invaluable; TweakXP Xteq's Xsetup CustomizerXP (I also bought 6 books on XP, but I can't really recommend any, as I found the authors all had basic confusions as to what was XP Home and what was XP PRo, and appeared to have used the Beta versions instead of the finals.) I hope some of this is helpfull.