>Thanks for your reply, i changed the files to 254 and rebooted but still got the same error, any other suggestions
Other than switching to NT, I can't think of any. What was the FILES= setting before you changed it, and the exact line that you set it to; CONFIG.SYS is funny about things like spaces on the line; IOW:
FILES=254
is OK, but
FILES = 254
may not be