>>>NT4 video drivers run at the i386 Ring 0, that is, the core OS can be corrupted by a bad driver. Download the latest one if you haven't already.
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>>That's what occurred, evidently. Good idea - I'll look into a driver update. This is a rather early 17-inch, at least 5 years old. I hope it's not another drive-wipe, I've already had 3 of them under NT :)
>
>Whoops, I was talking about your video card, not your monitor :-)

There is no video card, just an internal video device, I guess. These gov't machines come prefab, but the monitor came from an odd source, and has no software with it. But it did need a newer driver which I got off the web, that solved the problem with mouse & colors.

>With NT, you have a major issue that it simply doesn't support as wide a range of hardware as 9x. For the hardware it does support, you have to take some care to get the exactly correct, latest version drivers.
>
>So yes, you have a little extra up-front pain to get a system configured properly. But after that, it just goes into Energizer Bunny mode... ongoing support costs are so much lower it just plain makes sense.

Well, I'm not contesting that, really, I've been using NT a few months now, and it's pretty darn smooth for my VFP6 dev work after overcoming a few configuration problems. I just don't know that we have sufficient good LAN support staff for a wider NT move, that's the difficulty - they're all good at 95, many at 98, but very few at NT, and those are NTServer people trying to expand their horizons. No offices want to move first, since we all know the first offices to move to NT will be the training ground for LAN tech support and all the problems testers haven't discovered yet :) And then some of our large older apps in the downsize/upgrade process we've tested will just plain not run at all under NT yet, so we will have to keep some Win95 machines around for awhile, anyway.

My biggest beef though, which I may eventually win out on, is: why the heck not move to Win2K directly, instead of two moves about 1 year apart? It just doesn't make sense to me...a little more procrastination, and we'll be ready for Win2K, as testing will begin soon.