>>Based on my impressions of some of your posts, you seem to encounter an awful lot of reliability problems of various kinds.
>
>agreed. Big Time!
>
>>I would seriously consider a complete, bare-metal reinstallation of your entire environment. Reformat your HD (repartition to take advantage of FAT32 if applicable), reinstall the OS, and reinstall your apps. Ascertain your exact hardware and download the latest available drivers.
>
>done all that. Half a dozen times over the last 18 months. Most recently when I downloaded SP3 back in May. Feel another one coming on!
>
>>
>>I would especially recommend this if you've ever done an in-place OS upgrade (e.g. 3.1 to 95, 95 to 98 etc.) or if you've ever had an OS or Internet Explorer beta installed on your system.
>>
>>Seems drastic, I know, but you can probably get back up in a day or less. How much time have you spent chasing these problems?
>>
>>Some companies go through this process with their PCs every 6 months to a year, whether they are encountering problems or not.
>
>exactly what I do. But why the ******* hell should it be necessary!!??
>
>To be fair, I have recently found that a combination of Norton Utilities, Checkit and Memturbo have rendered my system vastly more stable. At the low point I could expect crash and burn failures up to 5 or 6 times a day. I now go for, ooh, sometimes a whole week without a forced reboot! I strongly recommend Memturbo in particular as after the frequent vfp dropouts, it flushes all the garbage from RAM so you start with a clean slate without having to reboot.
>
>Cheers
>
>Harry

Sounds like you're running some version of Win9x. If you want stability, switch to NT.