>I believe that a LARGE part of that might be attributed to windoze update checking out ALL the updates living on your machine, if it is an active service after boot. On 2 quite old/slow machines I sometimes set both parts of it to manual, and booting is much faster. But when I want to update I have to set those dang services to automatic again... Catch22...

As I said, I love the latest and greatest obsolete versions, ergo my updates are set to off, permanently. What may I need? Security updates for IE and Outlook - I'm not using either one of those. SP2 to get a dozen things screwed? No, thanks. I want to use my machine, not to have it used by the OS, and me always fiddling with this or that setting. I'm pleased with what I have now, and the only reason to upgrade to anything would be to stay compatible with what my customers will have.

>Still, (running W2K) I have 4 meg currently and maximum 7 meg for explorer - I will stay as long as possible on that old system. Has USB, has VFAT and NTFS5 and I don't need themes <g>.

Themes, what themes? :).

I stayed on w2k as long as I could, and when my previous machine started getting too many BSODs, I switched to XP SP1 - no help though, it was the onboard video card, which I didn't use at all, but Windows does, so it'd crash the machine regularly. I still have that machine, will try to load some Linux on it (probably Kubuntu) and see how it reacts. From what my HW guru (and son-in-law) says, it should be immune to that sort of problem.