you're quite welcome!  i had the same prob myself!

now the real question is, how to we prevent that problem from happening in the future?

ian

When I was in networking school I got the best tip ever.  The guy who taught me this actually wrote a bunch of the drivers for Unix for the military in the late 60's and 70's.  Now he does multi-media.

Start from scratch always.  Run windows on its own partition.  If you use 4 gigs for XP & 2k that would be plenty.  Set another partition up and intall all of your programs on that.  The final partition will be for all your files and/or downloads.  

This is for a few reasons.  

Windows should hardly ever need to be defragged.  It works alone!

If a program you install skrews with anything, it will only skrew with other programs.  Windows should be fine.

If you download or get a virus, it might corrupt your files, but windows will be intact as well as your programs.  Personally, my hard drive have 5 partitions.  I download into a smaller one and once I am sure there is no virus, then I move it over.  I also have DOS on a very small partition (C:).  Hackers and Viruses look for C: sometimes.  

Windows rarely crashes for me.  Every once and awhile I have a program crash, but I don't have to reboot.

I hope this helps everyone