Hi, I'm not a PC admin, but having asked those who are, the only advice about replacing the Kernel of the operating system, (the beating heart of NT, if such could be said to exist) the only advice I could get, (other than "DONT!") was "you'd better do it from a DOS session" which means you'd need to boot NTFS offline, which is no easy task, I have a tool for doing it, if you really need to, and I could tell you the name of it, but you'd really have to know what you were doing to even think about using it, (not to mention fully backing your system up first...) because if you replace it and it doesn;t take, you've killed the OS, a complete re-install is your only choice. If you're doing it from 98, (and there seems to some confusion about whether 98 has one) then it should be easier, just boot from a DOS floppy, but again, if you replace it and it doesn't take, you've shagged your box, "bring out your dead..." and re-install. It's basically a very, very, bad idea, that a sane admin would only try if he had no backup and no other choice. later jb