I appreciate that, thanks, the strange thing is of course, the laptop had been formatted, and windows put on afresh, so it was like running a new machine, and it had the exact same problem as the pc which had been running for over four years. So I think it must be a piece of software, or hardware that was connected to both machines that caused the problem. And bearing in mind the laptop only had a couple of downloaded software installed, I think I can narrow it down.

Anyone know if it's possible for a mouse to get a virus?
Or a modem?
Or could emule be the problem? Bearing in mind I've been using that for years without having any problems.