I hate to suggest something dumb, but how much RAM do you have? what other things are running in the background?(check the system tray, and if you are using winXP, you can see what processes are being run, when you Ctrl+Alt+Del). if you are running WinXP you should have at least 256MB RAM, better if you have more. if you do something like Folding@Home or SETI@Home or some other distributed computing project, you may want to shut it off while you are working. hth big_hoovie