Thanks Varian. It sounds as though you have covered most of the possibilities - different versions of Win 98, different partitions and so on. I am beginning to think that it must be related to something like my virus checker, but I don't want to remove that for obvious reasons, and it is the one I like best of the ones around. I don't have it on Win 95 because I can't use my ADSL line with that drive (USB not supported). There may be more to getting rid of its activities than simply exiting it. Or maybe it puts a dll somewhere that Vue does not like. Don has the same virus checker, so it could be the culprit, and I already have to exit it to use Zip Magic and burn cds. Now if someone says they have Vue4 living like a dream with PCCillin, there goes that theory too. I suspect I shall never know.