>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