I decided to try the acer discs one last time, and they worked. The cleaning I guess, or third times the charm. So waiting to hear how/when I should put the cards I removed back in.

Again thanks so much.

Well done. The cleaning is on old trick I learned on the PS2.

Anyway, you only took two cards out. So put the Video card in first and get the worst over with. What should happen is that it will detect the card and ask for drivers. If Windows doesn't find them and you don't have them, get them from the web- but you need to know the exact make and model of your video card.

Re-boot and run the PC without the modem card doing stuff with the display settings you would normally have.

I expect this to work because something happened to take your system out of a state of grace when it was previously stable. The re-install would have done the trick, fortunately.

Huh - a dirty XP disk!

Everything is working fine now. Thanks a million!! Off to enjoy the weekend. Hope you guys do too.

I had a client with similiar problem and the 'child' had set the deskktop top be a live web page with the address of a static picture on the computer. hence all that it would do is show that desktop picture and nothing else!

Worth just seeing is you can right click on the desktop and turn off active web page!
BOL
M