Do you have any virus-checking software running? You might want to turn that off, as well as any other software running in the background. Also, you might want to check out the previous posts about the patch causing a BSOD. Admittedly, it sounds like your problem is different, since you were having it before. But it's worth a try. One more thing you might want to try -- if you don't have recent drivers for your video card, you may want to update them. Sometimes that helps with software crashing (maybe even with software crashing your OS). I'm trying to think if there's anything else that I can remember from my days as tech support, but I can't think of anything. Oh -- remember when you send e-mail to tech support to tell them about things like software that runs in the background on your system. They'll be trying to figure out what's (hopefully) unusual about your system that's causing a crash. Good luck! Auralia