Good grief. So many responses! Thx all. Actually, I mainly use Mozilla. Occasionally (about twice a year) I have to resort to Internet Exploder. I also have a H/W firewall, McAfee AV and AdAware. (And Spybot sowhere on the system but I rarely use it.., maybe I should). And HiJack this.. Lately I have taken to opening up Task Manager immediately after booting up and scanning the running tasks. So far I have gotten rid of: mmod, AdMunch, RealSched (and Realplayer), qtask (and QuickTime) and mdm. The one I'm currently having problems with is regsvc.exe. I don't want it to run (this is a single user PC; I don't need to update the registry from a remote PC!), but I'm not sure how to go about it. I suspect I could run the uninstall (which appears to be a genuine MS NT update), but not sure if I'd upset anything else if I do... Cheers, Diolma