Hi JellyHead (just LOVE that nick )

Is there any more text in that error message? I highly doubt that's all it syays, and the extra information would be helpful. You should always include the full details of error messages when asking for assistance.

I suspect that there is a program loading at startup which needs to access a particular device, and that device is not presently installed. We need to determine what program is generating the message in order to determine what to do about it!

As well as finding out the full details of that error message, you could do the following:

On that problem system, click on 'Run', type in 'msconfig' and click OK
On the 'Startup' tab, list the entries which appear with a tick beside them. One of those entries is most likely the culprit, and we may be able to identify the problem from the list.

sorry to say this but it's really all the error message says! nothing else.. I'll try to find out what it's about, and be back later.. I appreciate the help.. =)

Specifically- check network-related settings and programs; the "Adapter" that the error is referring to is your network card.

oops! sorry, seems I made a little mistake: the error-message is called Error, and it says: There is no adapter detected! don't know if it makes any difference but that's what it says. seems my memory lets me down sometimes... =P

Has there been any hardware changes made to the computer? Also, is it a desktop or laptop? Sometimes you have a NIC (network interface card--"Adapter" in XP-speak) that is plugged in to the laptop and gets removed for doing stuff like traveling.

it's not a laptop, but it's a computer with xp. one of the harddrives was (I'm not quite sure what it's called in english but I'll give it a try) formatted (?), and after that the error message started to show up every time the computer starts up.

Could you get that startup list please, as I requested in my initial response. There's a chance that a program may be trying to run which was installed to the drive which has been formatted.

A good way to check would be to disable the entries in the list, one by one, to see if disabling one makes the error message go away. (Don't forget to reenable each before disabling another ) If one proves the culprit, you could simply leave it disabled, or let us know what it is to see if we can find a way to clean it up properly.

okay, it's a thing called RAID administrator! I tried to disable it, and the error-message didn't show up. should my boyfriend install it or disable it? I'm not even sure what RAID is to be honest! =P

RAID is a multiple hard drive backup technique. What that means is data is stored on multiple hard drives in such a way that if one (or two, in some set ups) goes down, you lose no data.

If you don't know what it is, you're probably better off backing up to CD-R... It won't be automatic, but it'll work.