now the truly weird thing is that the whole problem seems to have gone away. the pixies don't work on sunday?

had a friend over and was trying to show her what was wrong. did exactly the same things that i did when the problem first surfaced and nothing happened. nothing. no lock up. no weirdness. no nothing.

was certain that as soon as she left everything would go nuts but it hasn't so far.

another odd thing is that the google toolbar, which had disappeared, has reappeared. i was trying to get it to show and when i clicked on view > toolbars > google the norton toolbar would show instead. so maybe that was it?

maybe i imagined the whole thing?

or maybe it was what usually causes all my computer problems, the evil aligators.

we will see what happens tomorrow.

hey whatever :) Sounds like IE got unstuck on stupid. It happens.

Glad it's working good now.

So Annie it is now tomorrow and we're wondering how the puter is behaving.

no alligators so far. have not been on most of the day, first day of class.

still have the google toolbar, that disappeared about the time the problem started.

am clicking around on yahoo news, which crashed me before, no problem.

clearly you were right and the zero percentage didn't cause the problem.

so who knows. the last couple of changes dorry had me to make may have needed a good shutdown and cold boot to take effect and work.

in 98 a bad shutdown gave me the fixing it screen. in XP it doesn't seem to care if it is shut down properly or not?

also, when i turn on this computer it doesn't beep. i have volume turned off, but shouldn't it beep anyway? the 98 monitor thunked and then the computer beeped, so i could follow its progress. now no beep, no thunk.

in other news, have discovered that if a neighbor points at the new monitor screen with a long fingernail and scratches it, using the keyboard brush to brush cathair off of the monitor eliminates the scratches. and that i should put the screen cover back on before i allow anyone else to use my computer.

so looks like dorry fixed it, or scared it away. i surely was glad to have you guys back, i really panicked!

Don't know about that, but new computers definitely need tweaking to clean out the gremlins. Every vendor is different. That's why I love zone alarm. On a new computer, you find out as soon as you go online which services to disable and what vendor installed junk wants to phone home.

looks like i need to add zone alarm. i don't want to learn all this stuff. why can't a compter be as easy to use as a refrigerator? whine whine whine.

this computer came from comp usa, mail order. excellent service.

what i haven't done yet is check the startup menu. sigh.

original crisis was that i took the 98 in to have the cat hair cleaned out. i don't do the registry and i don't open the case. unfortunately something happened to my usb ports and i couldn't use my external cd to back up. then i got really sick and didn't deal with anything for a year. the friend who helps me with computers, and who built the 98 as a student, announced that the time had come to buy a new computer and found me this XP one. she told me not to bother backing up anything because she would put the old hard drive in the new machine.

unfortunately the cables or something refused to cooperate. so i have no backups for the last year, i have none of my old programs, i have backups on floppy but this doesn't have a floppy. i am going a little nuts here.

she has when she has time been zipping things off of the old drive and e mailing them to me but of course not the stuff i really need. she has two full time jobs and a life.

so when this thing got attacked by alligators i pretty much lost it. you have no idea what a comfort you are.

Annie

If you want to send the hard drive to me I will burn whatever you want onto cds and send it all back to you. I have plenty of time :)

Annie, next time you have a prob, definitely take us up on doing a remote assistance to help you. My son has and old friend out of state that is continually crashing himself, and remote assisting his computer is a heck of alot easier than emailing him back and forth to fix the prob.

It's a great tool. I don't know if ZS has tried it since he got XP, but I use it alot. Just PM me anytime you need help.

ZS - if you haven't tried remote assistance before you are welcome to login to my computer anytime and mess around with it :eek: Just shoot me a PM or email.

CSpace is awesome for RD!