>A rather disturbing situation has arisen. We are finding our applications GPF-ing,numeric overflow etc on these machines. Early enquiries show 100mg bus machines are all running peripherals that were designed for 66 mg bus machines. All efforts that worked in the past (like winding back the hardware acceleration in settings - display) do not work. This problem is not just an isolated corrupted index or report file. Anybody have any ideas ?

The bus speed you refer to is the memory bus speed - the rate that data is exchanged between DRAM and the processor, not the rate that data is exchanged between the motherboard and peripherals. There should be no issue related to the use of the higher memory bus speed with the more recent 350-450MHz PII processors based on the 440BX and 440GX chipset; using the older 233-333MHz processors on these motherboards will cauyse the motherboard to drop the memory bus clock to 66MHz. For a detailed description of what's going on with the 100MHz FSB (front side bus) try sysdoc.pair com

There are known issues with using FPW 2.6 and fast machines, regardless of the memory bus speed. If you check the KnowledgeBase here, you should find references to a program called SLowStart that reduces the processor speed during the loading of FPW that should get around this problem.