Ok, no need to apologize for that back n forth stuff, I found that to be informative as well. Ok step one, will be to try to boot up in safe mode and do a system recovery, next will be to test my ram. All my ram and my motherboard are less than 2 yrs old. Someone has also let me borrow that floppy disk to check the memory, I ran it on the 256 about 3 weeks ago and nothing wrong showed up, but I was too lazy to check the other ram stiks, :/ If I can get past first base, I'll try to do the online checks for viruses. Wish me luck, still got 9 hrs left before I'm home to try these ideas. Is the suspense killin ya? I know it is me :-D