well glad you foudn the bug.. see how informatic and computer are an illogical matter (while based on exact sciences themselves)... i too had crazy hardware conflicts i couldn't even figure about, and i am a bit knowfull of my sstem, though. in case this thign happen again or ANY similar things to you, i have an advice: watchout at Sysinternals for their diagnostic/monitoring tools. I have the trio of them (process9x, filemon and regmon) adn whenever i have strange errors, i just spy my system to understand what/where it went wrong. think abotu it, it helps