No sweat Bill, I very much appreciated your assistance. I have been at this "battle" with Microsoft since at least DOS 3 days too & enjoy a good mystery. It's reassuring to know that at least one of the laws of nature still hold true (the one about Microsloth's inability to make a reliable OS) in these fast changing days. I have, through sometime painful experience, learned to partition my large drives keeping anything that makes an entry in the registry (like operating systems, programs, etc.) on C:\ drive, & everything else is catalogued on the virtual drives with backups to CDs or DVDs. Consequently my "slash & burn" repairs to Windows are fairly painless & only cost a few hours. I have learned now not to rely too heavily on "Restore" points, and no windows updates will be applied to my PC until they have been out for at least a month so I can watch the dust settle first!
I hate to admit it to the world at large, but I am very much enjoying my leisure hours without our "national sport"! Talk about blasphemy eh?
Thanks again Bill, it's great to have someone at your level of expertise to "talk" with on here.
Harry.