Ugh...Dorry just reminded me...you'll have to enable flash to get into the chats.

Tools > Manage add ons > click the drop down
thingie > highligh Macromedia flash or something like that > enable > ok

but the reason i disabled it in the first place is because it triggers my seizures.

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.